What is beauty?

An article I recommend by Trent Beattie featuring an interview with Margaret Laracy on the nature, objectivity, and effects of beauty.

Companions for the Year of Faith

The coming Year of Faith (11 October 2012 to 24 November 2013) is a great opportunity to refresh our understanding of the Catholic faith, and strengthen our confidence in it. There are plenty of books I could recommend, beginning obviously with The Magnificat Year of Faith Companion. This is a superb pocket-sized compendium of wonderful spiritual reading for the whole year. Timothy Radcliffe's Why Go to Mass? is still an encouraging (and amusing) read. Henri de Lubac's The Discovery of God could melt the heart of the most decided atheist. CTS have some great booklets for the Year of Faith and more on the way. And for a rich and robust apologetics taking you all the way from natural reason via sound scriptural analysis to the heights of mystical experience get hold of Barry R. Pearlman's A Certain Faith, on behalf of which I am waging something of a one-man campaign (do join me!). I will be reviewing this in the upcoming Second Spring.

A view of British children

An article by Anthony Daniels in the Telegraph newspaper (7 Sept. 2012) presented a rather sad view of the situation of many children in modern Britain. Here is a section of the piece:

British children are by far the fattest in Europe (three times as many of them as in France are truly obese), and even among the fattest in the world. A very high percentage of them never, or only very rarely, eat a meal at a table with other members of
their family – or perhaps I should say household. Indeed, there is often no table at which they could eat such a meal if it ever occurred to anyone to provide them with one.
   When I entered such a home – as I often did as a doctor – I discovered no evidence that cooking had ever taken place in it, beyond reheating of prepared food in the microwave. The children did not so much eat meals as forage or graze, more or less ad libitum. One of the most elementary forms of civilised social intercourse was therefore alien to them.
   Meanwhile, down the road, there were Indian shops selling fresh vegetables so cheap that you could hardly carry away all you could buy for £10 – the cost of 30 cigarettes. It goes without saying that the homes of which I speak were plentifully supplied with flat television screens, some of them as wide as the sky, and almost always illuminated.
   The pattern of child-rearing in Britain is all too often that of a toxic combination of overindulgence and neglect. First a child is bribed into silence, or at least minimal compliance, by being given what it wants; then, when it is old enough to demand rather than request, it does so. A higher proportion of parents in Britain end up frightened of their own children than anywhere else known to me – I never saw it in Africa, where I lived for several years. And it is not only their parents who are frightened of them: who these days dares to tell children to behave themselves in a public place? Old people shrink away from them in fear; I have not seen this in other countries.
   About a fifth of our children leave school unable to read or write fluently. This is not the consequence of poverty: on average, at least £50,000 will have been spent on their education. No doubt bad schools, bad teachers, and bad teaching methods have a part to play. But it cannot be easy to be a teacher of children whose parents, or parent and latest lover, will take the child’s part in any disciplinary dispute because of their egotistical belief that anything that emerges from them must be above reproach....
   By the end of his childhood, a youngster is considerably more likely to have a television in his bedroom than a father living at home. The combination of family instability and a vulgar, celebrity-obsessed, low-IQ and all but inescapable popular culture (of which, incidentally, the BBC’s website for home consumption is clearly a manifestation), means that British children lead the western world in many forms of self-destructive as well as unattractive behaviour.
   But none of this is poverty, properly so-called: it is squalor, mental, emotional, moral, psychological, cultural and often, as a result, physical too. But to call it poverty is actually to make it worse, in so far as it misidentifies the problem and fosters the very culture of dependency that brings so much of it about in the first place.

The point that material "poverty" is less the problem here than a kind of cultural degeneration is well made and rings true. But that is a problem that runs deeper than the "culture of dependency" to which Daniels makes reference, and the solution is not as simple as reducing benefit payments.

Beauty of Numbers

Michael S. Schneider's wonderful work A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe, which I recommended in Beauty for Truth's Sake, is linked to a lot of classroom teaching that Michael has done over the years. This has now been captured in his superb DVD called Constructing the Universe, which could be an important resource for teachers and parents seeking to get their children and pupils interested in the properties and transformations of numbers and shapes, and the way these patterns underlie the forms and processes of the natural world. Modestly he says, "This DVD wasn’t made directly for youngsters but for adults who might enjoy seeing a philosophical approach to numbers, culture and the universe. It's a modern take on traditional mathematical cosmology weaving numbers, shapes, proportions, nature, art, mythology and symbolism into a whole united by mathematics. I think it would be a bit much for most youngsters, although there are some sections they might enjoy seeing. Perhaps high schoolers with an interest in math and these ideas might appreciate it." That is surely an understatement. Well worth trying out!

Effects of the Reformation

Part of our recent Summer School was about the effects of the English Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries – not just the effects on Roman Catholics, who now entered into a period of savage repression and iconoclasm, but the effects on the economy and society of England as a whole. The destruction of much of the fabric of civil society, on which the working classes and the poor depended, created a new kind of poverty and a new society, simultaneously laying the foundations of modern international finance and the wages system. A useful summary of all this can be read in a recent issue of The Social Crediter (read Parts 3 and 3).

Revival and Romanticism

In order to understand the English Catholic Revival that we studied at our Summer School in Oxford recently, we need to appreciate that it originates not only as a counter-reaction to the English Reformation, but as a development of the Romantic movement. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, the Gothic Revival, and the Arts and Crafts movement in the nineteenth century, Revival writers found inspiration in the medieval past, and in England’s traditional devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary (as Léonie Caldecott’s seminar showed). They sought to restore the human dignity of the poor that had been shorn away by the factory system and big business.

They shared with the Romantic poets a belief in the importance of the imagination. For Coleridge, imagination was “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception... a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM”, and Keats wrote: “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination”. William Blake said: “Jesus is the Imagination.”

But Revival writers (from Newman to Tolkien) emphasized imagination as a way of apprehending truth; and strove to overcome the dichotomy between reason and feeling, or thought and emotion, which remained a legacy of the battles between Romanticism and Rationalism in the period after the French Revolution. They defended a sacramental faith in which God as the author of nature uses natural symbols not only to raise our spirits or reveal himself in some vague sense, but to communicate grace to mankind, assuming human nature and history through the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ.

Thus the Revival separated itself from Romanticism as that movement turned increasingly against Christianity and traditional morality and belief.
Though like Romanticism it was a literature of protest against the mechanization of life and the “bourgeois” mentality of Victorian England, it was, as Chesterton noted in The Victorian Age, “a rational movement; almost a rationalist movement”. It was a “protest of the rationality of religion as against the increasing irrationality of mere Victorian comfort and compromise.”

The Romantics were right to question the intellectual order of the Enlightenment, because this was a false order and the rejection of the true Logos. The mistake lay further back, in the rejection of Scholastic wisdom by Nominalism and Voluntarism a couple of centuries before the Renaissance. Thus the move from medievalist or pre-Raphaelite nostalgia to the recovery of a religious, indeed a Catholic, perspective was perfectly legitimate. And to the extent that today’s culture is largely shaped by Rationalsim and Romanticism, it is legitimate for us to follow the path trodden by the Catholic Literary Revival in our own time, searching for a balance of truth and feeling, of life and intelligence, of imagination and wisdom, in a “return to religion”.

Some of the questions we leave our students thinking about:
What can we still learn from these writers?
Why did the movement decline after the Second World War?
How is the human imagination a way of apprehending (or helping to apprehend) truth?
What is the mission of the Christian writer, playwright, poet, artist, or film-maker today?
How can we ourselves best portray, represent, and defend the Christian doctrine in the face of modern atheism or indifference?

Prayer for a new Catholic Literary Revival (from Idylls Press)
O, Jesus, who said, “heaven and earth shall pass away, but my Word shall not pass,” you are the Living and Eternal Word through whom all that exists was made and is sustained. You delighted in proclaiming the Good News of the Kingdom by means of stories. Through the intercession of Mary Most Holy, St Joseph (your guardian, Mary’s chaste spouse, and protector of Christ’s faithful), St Francis de Sales (patron of Catholic writers), Blessed John Henry Newman (patron of Catholic essayists and novelists), Blessed John Paul II the Great (patron of Catholic poets, artists, playwrights, and personalists), and all the holy men and women throughout the ages who have spread the Kingdom of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty by means of words and images, we ask you humbly but confidently for the graces we need to contribute to a renewed culture of beauty (in service of love and life), including a Catholic literary revival, for our times.
Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be.
Jesus, Eternal Beauty, we trust in you. Most Holy Trinity, have mercy on us and on the whole world.
Amen.

Illustrations: the rolling English road at Uffington; Blake's Angel of Revelation; St Barnabas Church in Oxford's Jericho, a home of the Pre-Raphelites.

Summer School

Our annual Summer School, for students of Thomas More College in New Hampshire and others, directed by Leonie and Teresa Caldecott, turned out to be great fun. The 2012 course concluded by looking at Christian writers of the later nineteenth and twentieth century who represent a “Catholic literary revival” – part of the Catholic resurgence prophesied by Newman in his “Second Spring” sermon of 1852, after the lifting of restrictions that had been imposed on Catholics since the Reformation. We studied the roots of this revival in the English Catholic culture before and after the Reformation, including the dissolution of the monasteries and the persecutions that followed. The conflicts and tensions in Reformation England were studied through the eyes of our greatest writer, William Shakespeare, with the help of Lady Asquith, author of the brilliant Shadowplay.

Thus for the the first part of the School we located the students at Downside Abbey, in the West Country near Bath, where the Abbot, Dom Aidan Bellenger, gave some superb lectures on the dissolution of the monasteries, and other lecturers spoke on the subsequent history of the Reformation. Downside is near to Mells, too, the family home of Lady Asquith, and there were excursions there and to Wells, Bath, and Glastonbury. Then off to Oxford via the White Horse of Uffington and the recusant house at Mapledurham, kindly hosted by the owner John Eyston (a direct descendant of St Thomas More).

In Oxford the students stayed at the Benedictine Hall of the University, St Benet's, and there we began to focus on the 19th century Catholic Emancipation, the Oxford Movement, and the Catholic revival itself, with G.K. Chesterton its biggest fruit (and here access to the Chesterton Library gave an almost sacramental connection to the great man himself). Visits to colleges, to C.S. Lewis's home at the Kilns, his grave in Headington Quarry and Tolkien's grave at Wolvercote, all helped to bring the ideas to life. (The picture shows Aidan Mackey and Stratford Caldecott with some of the students in the Chesterton Library.)

The last evening in Oxford was spent with Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis's friend, and the final day involved an excursion to London, to see Westminster Abbey, St Thomas More's cell in the Tower of London, and a performance of The Taming of the Shrew at the Globe Theatre. The experience of a lifetime? Perhaps, though we hope to see many of our students return to visit us in the future.

Leonie, Teresa, and Stratford Caldecott

Photos are from our Facebook page. Watch out for announcements by the end of the year about next summer's programme!

See also the following posts:
Revival and Romanticism
Effects of the Reformation