Sir James MacMillan on Creativity and Sacred Music: From the Ashes of Modernism to Cultural Renewal

Two video interviews and an article about his philosophy of sacred music, recently published in the National Catholic Register.

I am delighted to share with you two hours of interviews with Sir James MacMillan, master composer and conductor, about how creating beautiful music can save culture from the ashes of modernism. One is by myself and the other by my wife, Margarita Mooney Clayton. Aside from being one of the greatest living composers and conductors of classical music, Sir James is a Catholic whose faith informs all his work. As you will see, he is a deep thinker who communicates clearly the nature of the creative process when one seeks to create beauty to bring Glory to God.

Further, my wife’s reflections on music and silence in the light of these interviews were published, recently in The National Catholic Register!

In June 2024, Margarita and I each sat down with MacMillan in the studios of Princeton Theological Seminary. He was leading master classes for composers of choral music in an event jointly sponsored by Peter Carter’s Catholic Sacred Music Project and the Scala Foundation, whose mission is to make authentic beauty accessible to wide audiences, a cause that MacMillan shares. Another major sponsor was the Benedict XVI Institute.

Here is my interview:

And, here is Margarita’s:

In addition to the two full-length interviews, we are delighted to share clips from each of the interviews on these topics:

• The umbilical link between music and silence

• Gregorian chant as the DNA of sacred music

• To breach with the past is destruction

• Tradition is a flowing river

• Christian artists redeem the abyss

• Analogies between music and prayer

• The umbilical link between music and silence

MacMillan’s statement that “the war against silence is a war against ourselves and against our interior life” rang true because I see many turning to thoughtless political activism to fill their interior void.

Finally, some music! Here is a beautiful performance, in the presence of the composer, of Sir James’ Give Me Justice in the chapel of Princeton Theological Seminary at the event. The conductor is Tim McDonnell, also of the Catholic Sacred Music Project.

The Art of Virtue and the Virtue of Art

This is the foreword to The Shape of the Artistic Mind, by Fr Bradley T. Elliot, OP, recently published by Pontifex University Press on September 6. It is written by Margarita Mooney Clayton.

What is art for? For many, the answer is that art is simply for self-expression or for enjoyment. Listening to music is pleasing (who chooses to listen to ambulance sirens?) Anyone who appreciates art can see that a Picasso is not a Rembrandt—the imprint of each artist is distinct.

What is moral virtue for? Moral virtue is a means of human perfection. Moral virtue is doing good; moral virtue requires effort, perhaps sacrificing something short-term for a longer-term material or spiritual benefit. 

The idea that art is related to moral virtue will strike many as quite odd. Art, understood as self-expression or enjoyment, is a spontaneous realm apart from the calculating, choosing, and sacrificing of virtue. Art as self-expression or enjoyment must therefore allow for total freedom to explore one’s desires; by contrast, the hard-won perfection of moral virtue requires restraint and discipline.

Modern Romantic notions of art have emphasized the subjectivity of human creativity, purportedly to free human instincts in order to reach their fulfillment. But by separating art from reason, Romanticism opened the way for what we see today: much of the art produced today is kitsch—excessively sentimental—or transgressive (seeking to shock or produce outrage).

Catholic kitsch: prayer cards from the 20th century

But in his book The Shape of the Artistic Mind,,  Fr. Brad Elliott, O.P., provides a crucial philosophical grounding that will connect art back to moral virtue. Re-thinking the relationship between art and virtue leads to very different answers to the questions: What is art for? What is moral virtue for?

Through a thorough review of Thomistic principles, Elliott moves from considerations about art as an imitation of God’s creation to art as a virtuous participation in God’s governance. For Elliott, both art and moral virtue are ways that humans imitate God; by imitating God, we therefore participate in His governance, as he draws all things back to Himself. To some finite degree, all creation, from small living organisms like molecules to inanimate things like stones, participate in God’s being. But Elliott emphasizes that only the rational human person participates in God's governance through the activity of acting and making.

By bringing new things into being, humans co-create with God. Apart from virtue, the power to bring new things into being will be disordered. As he writes, “art and morality are merely two aspects of man’s participation in the reason and creativity of God.” Hence, art seen as a practical virtue extends God’s governance over creation. Humans move towards their proper ends, contribute to their own governance, through co-creation with God.

Elliott contrasts this view with Plato, for whom human creativity could only ever represent a shadow of the ultimate reality. For Plato, no human advancement in knowledge or art could ever get us out of the cave—we are forever seeing only shadows of reality.

By contrast, Elliott explains that our rationality is not purely speculative or abstract. Rather, the human person has the unique capacity to take an idea and impress it upon the external world, making what we create something that shares in the spark of God’s reason. As he explains, building on St. Thomas Aquinas, Etienne Gilson and other Catholic thinkers, “by learning to imitate nature and her laws through skill or craft, the human intellect is also learning to imitate the Divine creator… Simply put; God, nature, human intellect, and art all relate by a mysterious pattern of imitation spanning the whole range of the cosmos.”

By emphasizing the intellect as a commonality between art and moral virtue, Elliott does not dis-regard human enjoyment or self-expression. The problem is that not all things that humans create, think, or do are good. If we are fallen and wounded creatures, why would we magically expect all art to be morally good? And why do so many people seem to think that there is no objectivity in what we enjoy or how we express ourselves?

Elliott’s Christian anthropology—his understanding of who we are as humans—underlies his entire argument. Human beings are a unity of body and soul; we have the capacity to make things and to contemplate. Elliott brilliantly describes how humans imitate God in a finite manner by bringing the outside world into the mind through contemplation and then going back out, perfecting things in art. As he writes:

“This bringing the outside world into the inside world terminating in the perfection of the inside, the intellect’s perfection of knowing, is the intrinsic operation of which St. Thomas speaks. By this action, the created intellect imitates God-as-artist in an unprecedented way, by imitating, in a finite manner, the oneness and unity of its creator…Art or craft is the mode by which the perfection of the inside world (the act of knowledge) impresses its likeness on the outside world; perfective action moving from the inside out.”

If moral virtue is imitating God’s goodness, and artistic creation is imitating God’s creation, then co-creating through art is one of the ways we participate in God’s governance. Art and moral virtue, thus, participating in God’s governance: using human freedom to direct our thinking and action towards their true ends.

Art understood as a practical virtue makes visible the invisible inner world of the human person and the goodness of God. By participating in God’s governance, art understood as a practical virtue contributes to the right ordering of creation.

St Joseph with Our Lord, by Georges De La Tour, French 17th century.

In spite of our woundedness as experienced in laziness, idle curiosity, and self-centeredness, we can grow in virtue through art. Elliott provocatively states that “it is the virtue of art that emerges as the supreme master coordinator between man’s internal and external worlds.” The very act of writing this short essay is an expression of art as a practical virtue: I’ve fought many distractions as I read and pondered Elliott’s words and crafted my own thoughts into words to share with readers.

Art is not moral as in a command about how to act, but art can “indirectly influence morals by providing an ‘aptness’ to act well.” Like books and articles which encapsulate ideas into form, the music, paintings, nature, we encounter are an invitation to contemplate God’s goodness. Focusing my attention to craft this article forms my inner life to be more apt in moral virtue. By co-creating with God, we imitate His goodness, participate in His governance, and bring more of creation into the divine unity.

Buy The Shape of the Artistic Mind

St Bonaventure Receiving the Blessed Sacrament, by Francisco Herrera the Elder, Spanish, 17th century.

Margarita Mooney Clayton is founder and Executive Director of the Scala Foundation, a non-profit which has the mission of promoting beauty in education and the transformation of American culture.

Fr Bradley T. Elliot is a priest of the Western Dominican Province of the USA.

Book Recommendation: The Art Of Principled Entrepreneurship By Andreas Widmer

Aligning Business, Graced Creativity, Capitalism and the Common Good

Last week I wrote about the ‘graced imagination’ and its role in human supernatural creativity, based upon Thomas Aquinas’ description of the imagination. This week, I am discussing a book that describes one the most important human activities to which that supernatural creativity can contribute, the work of entrepreneurship.

The author of The Art of Principled Entrepreneurship, Andreas Widmer, teaches at the Catholic University of America business school, and is himself an experienced entrepreneur. This is not a dense book on business theory, but a readable description of a set of principles that govern good business, written to inspire entrepreneurs to follow their calling and contribute positively to society. It is well thought out and the writer clearly understands how what he describes is rooted in Catholic social teaching, and so, I suggest, a few open-minded intellectuals might learn something by reading this book.

This should be distinguished, incidentally, from the ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) movement which is all the rage at the moment, and is presented a way of making business just, but in fact promotes the values of destructive revolutionary Marxism, destroying lives and the profitability of business. Principled entrepreneurship, in contrast, genuinely benefits all involved because it is directed to the common good.

Widmer first defines Principled Entrepreneurship, as that which maximizes the long term profitability of the business by creating superior value for customers while consuming fewer resources and always acting lawfully and with integrity. (Principled Entrepreneurship is a trade mark)

Then he sets out and explains the principles by which this ideal is achieved. These are his ‘Five Pillars’ :

• The economy exists for people, not people for the economy
• To work is to create, to create is to be human
• Culture eats strategy for breakfast
• Principled business creates win-win solutions
• Always think like an entrepreneur.

These are understandable statements in themselves, but it is not apparent immediately to someone like myself who is not a natural businessman how they apply to business. Widmer does a good job of explaining their meanings and their application in real situations, so that we can relate the abstract principles to particular concrete situations. No one should be fooled, however, by the approachable, chatty style of writing that he is treating the subject superficially. On the contrary, his descriptions reflect a deep understanding of Catholic social teaching and years of experience in business.

The practice of doing business does not always receive good press (to put it mildly). While many recognise that without it we’d all be impoverished, those who are good at business are often assumed to be so because they are greedier than their competitors, and that their success is at the expense of others.

Consequently, the images that the words capitalism, business, industrialization, corporate culture, for example, conjure for many people are influenced by hundreds of years of Romantic, Socialist and Marxist critiques and false propaganda, which paints these activities as necessarily exploitative and destructive. So while the small-businessman, such as the street vendor, might be viewed positively, it is often assumed that the business executive or owner of a large business, must be resorting to exploitation and inducing misery for others, because they are assumed to be making more money. Bosses are by definition callous and smug crooks or fat cats, living comfortable lives separated from their workers or customers.

The Board Room, 1900, by Ferdinand Brutt

It is a human activity therefore that is intrinsically, at least partly evil. It must therefore be regulated by government, so the argument runs, to stop the more greedy and unprincipled from dominating the market, and from pushing competition from the principled and virtuous small businessman out of the market. If the businessman can redeem himself, it is only by being a philanthropist who gives his money to charity afterwards, or lowers prices out of charity to reduce profits.

This is a false picture. While it is certainly the case that there are bad people in business, the actual practice of creating and establishing a business is not an intrinsically evil pursuit, I would contend, and so would Andreas Widmer. Rather, it is more accurate to say that the ends to which it is directed reflect directly the intentions of those who run the business, for good or ill.

In that sense business is just like art - the artist can exercise his skill well or badly, but the practice of creating art does not naturally incline him in either direction. We might observe, for example, that most of the art schools in the country promote one or other iteration of Marxist ideology with their art, but that doesn’t make art intrinsically bad. It just makes for bad art. It is still worth becoming an artist and directing that calling to a Christian end.

Once we accept this premise, that doing business is an intrinsically good pursuit, this changes everything. Rather than being a necessary evil to be controlled by regulation, it becomes - as with any other natural human activity - one that might be a personal vocation and open to guidance by the grace of God. Supernatural creativity and the graced imagination can potentially guide its practice.

Considered in this way, the actual practice of doing business can be a virtue, just as the creation of fine art is a virtue. As a virtue, its practice can lead to joy and fulfillment in life as part of the Christian vocation. It is not a moral virtue, although it is a given that one cannot be virtuous if the moral law is broken. The principle of choice in this virtue is not the moral law, but rather the recognition of the greatest good, which is the most beautiful route forward. The more we become sensitive to the beauty around us and to beauty as a sign of the divine, the more we are inclined to take the more beautiful choices before us. This applies to businessmen as much as it does to fine artists, for all are called to the Way of Beauty.

This idea that the interests of business ( and capitalism in general) are in conflict with the good of society and ordinary people arises, it seems to me from what I would say are flawed conceptions of the common good and the love of self, that lead to the idea that the two are necessarily in conflict with each other. The question then is how to reconcile them in practice?. Some argue that the interests of the individual person must be subordinated to those of the common good, while others argue the reverse. Both are in error. Societies that are structured around these assumptions, I would argue, tend to either Godless tyranny or Godless anarchy (which in turn leads to tyranny) respectively.

A similar tension exists in the minds of many also between the right to private property and the common good, and this too is seen by some as two irreconcilable principles that require one to be compromised in order for any practical route forward to be attained. In this case private property is usually viewed as a necessary evil at best which must be restricted so that the common good is not compromised.

As a consequence of these errors of understanding, business is seen as an intrinsically selfish pursuit, at best a necessary evil and a bi-product of the Fall. The grasping businessman who is successful can only redeem himself by giving away his profits as a philanthropist.

Portrait of a Businessman, by Mikhael Vrubel; Russian, 19th century.

I hold to the view that there is no conflict between self interest, private property rights and the common good. In fact when each is understood properly (this is a topic too long for this blog today) all are perfectly aligned in God and for the good of all both collectively and personally. So in my understanding, what is in accord with the common good is best for me personally; and the right to private property is a necessary condition of a just society in which people are free to move to the common good. The common good, incidentally, is a metaphysical principle which is attained when we seek God.

This book by Andreas Widmer is grounded in what I believe is the correct understanding of the patterns of the relationships between private property rights, self-interest and the common good. The principled entrepreneur will, he explains, actually lead to a more successful business that is profitable and affects those who encounter it (whether as investor, worker or customer) spiritually and materially for the good.

It will, I hope, inspire those who have a vocation of work to adopt an entrepreneurial approach that is a graced, innovative and imaginative in their daily work. Even a cog in a corporate machine, can, in the vision of Widmer, become an entrepreneurially minded, creative influence for the good, inspired by God, who draws people to God.

One of the five pillars that he describes as being essential to the principled entrepreneurial mindset is: ‘to work is to create, and to create is to be human’. In the opening paragraph of the chapter he says:

When we work, we do not only make more, but we become more. The Principled Entrepreneur is primarily a creator - someone who pursues their excellence by creating value for others profitably. That value entails supporting others on the team in their pursuit of excellence and appropriately rewarding all stakeholders physically, mentally and spiritually. (p57)

Beautiful mass production! Wedgewood pottery in their factory in England

It is clear that for Widmer, being an entrepreneur is as much a creative pursuit for him as painting is for me. In fact, it might be even more so - I suspect that he is probably more successful as an entrepreneur than I am as an artist!

Port Sunlight in northern England. This is the workers village created for workers for the Lever Bros. Sunlight Soap factory, complete with the Lady Lever Art Gallery which contains the best collection of pre-Raphaelite art in the country.

Access the Graced Imagination to Love and Serve the Lord

I want to recommend a short but brilliant article by Sr. Thomas More Stepnowski, O.P., on the workings of the imagination, and its important role in opening an internal door that leads to our grasp of Truth in faith and love, through the contemplation of God.

Sr. Stepnowski is a member of the St. Cecilia Dominican Congregation, based in Nashville, Tennessee and her article, entitled How the Mystery Is Imprinted in the Heart’s Memory - The Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Imagination is one essay in the book Speaking the Truth in Love: The Catechism and the New Evangelization, published by Emmaus Academic and edited by Petroc Willey and Scott Sollom.

An abbreviated version of Sr. Stepnowski’s piece appears online, here, in the University of Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal.

Both articles draw on an essay of W Norris Clarke called The Creative Imagination, which is in his book The Creative Retrieval of Saint Thomas Aquinas: Essays in Thomistic Philosophy, New and Old.

Sr Stepnowski describes how an imagination formed by the liturgy, and bestowed with God’s grace, gives us an enhanced ability to meditate upon both the Word of God in Scripture, and to read the Book of Nature with fresh eyes, recognizing Creation as a sign of the Creator.

This same imagination, which she terms a ‘graced imagination’, is a principle of creativity by which we, united to Christ and partaking of His divine nature, can see how to govern our own daily activities and participate in the creative work of God. Activity directed by the graced imagination, both in our worship or in our work outside the liturgy, leads to personal fulfillment.

In describing the graced imagination, the primary concern of Sr Stepnowski, consistent with the main theme of the book in which it appears, is its role in evangelization. She argues for catechesis that develops the creative imagination as a form of ‘pre-evangelization’, which primes us to be receptive to the truths of the faith.

In doing so, she distinguishes it from what is commonly called the ‘Catholic Imagination’ by cultural commentators. The graced imagination refers to all operations of the imagination enhanced by grace. This has a broader operation that permeates and informs potentially all operations of the intellect and will. The Catholic Imagination, on the other hand, is a term typically used by commentators to refer to the use of the imagination by creative Catholics in the fine arts, especially literature and poetry and would be used to apply to, for example, the works of Tolkein and Flannery O’Connor. The products of the Catholic Imagination may well result from a ‘graced’ imagination, but the graced imagination refers to the elevation of potentially every operation of the imagination, which can inform pretty much any human activity.

To explain this, she establishes first what the imagination is. The imagination she tells us, citing St Thomas Aquinas, is a faculty of the mind by which data - ‘colors, textures, scents’ and images - are first drawn from the senses and then stored for the use of the intellect. The imagination is more than a simple data warehouse, however, for it can subsequently piece together such data in novel ways, in response to other stimuli, and to create new pictures or ideas then delivered, so to speak, to the intellect. In the example she quotes, she says that if we are told of a ‘golden mountain’ that we have never seen, we immediately connect our impressions of golden objects and mountains we have seen, and then create a composite image of the golden mountain, which does not exist in reality.

This natural tendency to connect things in our mind is what allows us to derive meaning from what we see. However, as she points out the unguided or badly formed natural imagination can be unruly and it ‘rebuffs the intellect with grave consequences’, especially if harmful images, pornography for example, are among the stimuli.

It is wise therefore to seek an ordering principle that guides the imagination in what it selects and connects and which can read the signs of nature correctly. The best ordering principle, she says, is Scripture. Scripture tells us through the imagery of (e.g.) the Psalms, how to understand nature as a beautiful sign of the Creator. Once we have a catechesis that explains to us through the study of scripture the meaning of what we are seeing in nature, we are primed also to recognise the symbolism of what we see in sacred art and in the Church’s liturgy. As a result we are more likely to enter into the mystery of the sacramental life.

Through this process of Christian formation - a Christian inculturation, one might say - the ‘secular’ imagination can operate in an ordered way and help us to see things as God intends. This is still not necessarily the ‘graced’ imagination, however, for it might still rely on natural reason to understand what is seen. This ordered but natural imagination is the imagination of one who understands and maybe even delights superficially in the truth and sees the value of what he understands, but is always as a detached observer.

Jordan Peterson, as he presents himself publicly, adopts the position of one who has a well-ordered natural imagination. He is a gifted commentator who recognizes the value of and understands much of Scripture and the Christian view or nature as sign and symbol, but nevertheless treats it as a benign myth to learn from, rather than a truth to be grasped. It is fiction, but imparts good values and a pattern for good living. Through his approach, many have subsequently become practicing Christians, but he doesn’t admit to being a full believer himself in the way that a Christian would understand faith. He would argue, I think, that every society needs a myth or a story that imparts the values that its members must have in order to be fully participating members. Our myth is Salvation History, just as the Odyssey and the Aeneid were the myths for the Greeks and Romans, and so this should be imparted to Westerners.

Their myth: a 3rd century AD Roman mosaic of Odysseus, from Homer’s epic poem.

The graced imagination, in contrast, belongs to the person who not only accepts the meaning of symbolism intellectually, but loves what he knows as a sign of the Good in the most profound way. Such a person joyfully and willingly orders his life according to it at the deepest level. This is supernatural faith, and its sign is a desire and commitment to participate in the liturgy and the sacramental life, as a full member of the Catholic Church. The person with the graced imagination then partakes of the divine nature, and experiences the deepest fulfillment in this life. This becomes a positive reinforcing process with infinite progress, for the more deeply we participate in the mysteries of the sacramental life in this spirit, the more we are given and in turn, the more we desire it.

Going further than the scope of the article itself and here offering my own reactions, I would say that the person whose imagination is fired by grace becomes that ‘supernatural man’ described by Pius XI in Divini illius magistri as the product of a good Catholic education. The supernatural man not only experiences the continual deepening of his faith, as described above, but then contributes creatively to the work of God in the world around us, creating beauty and enhancing our surroundings to draw people to Him yet more powerfully.

There is no guarantee that this supernatural state can be induced in anyone by an education, as it requires a free assent of the heart, without compulsion, to be genuine. But partaking of the divine nature is within the reach of any who accept God in their hearts through Christ, and there is an established formation that inclines us, at least, to such a movement of the heart. This is a Catholic education with mystagogical catechesis at its heart and which leads us to its consummation in right worship.

Our ‘myth’? Noah in the Ark of Salvation, Palatine Chapel, Sicily 11th century AD

Conventional, classroom study of Scripture and Salvation History prepares us for right worship, but the greatest preparation for the Mass is the Liturgy of the Hours. Through the singing of the psalms and canticles of Scripture, and the readings in the context of the Church’s worship in the Liturgy of the Hours, the natural imagination is tutored and ordered in a profound way - more deeply than is possible by study of these texts in the classroom alone. Praying the Hours inclines us most powerfully to desire Christ as the still center of the Liturgy, in the Eucharist. The more that non-Catholics are immersed in this practice - even if initially only participating superficially, as say curious or sympathetic observers, the more it is likely that their hearts will be transformed.

Similarly, the Liturgy of the Hours prepares us to take what we receive in the Mass and apply it gracefully in the world. It refocuses our attention to follow the commandment we are given at the dismissal, to ‘go in peace to love and serve the Lord’ in the world. It inclines us powerfully to maintain an openness to grace, and to allow this same ‘graced’ or creative imagination to contribute to the ordering of our daily activities. This could lead to the production of high art that commentators would recognise as the product of a ‘Catholic Imagination’, but it could as likely lead to creative and inspired work in any other field of endeavor, including many that one would not normally associate with creativity, such as say bookkeeping or cleaning the bathroom (apologies to any noble book keepers and cleaners out there!)

As an artist I would note that the traditional formation of an artist is directed both to engendering the skills of his art, but also to forming the graced imagination.

I would argue that when such a formation is given to anyone (not just those who wish to become artists) in the context of good Catholic education, then it would develop the facility for supernatural creativity, as governed by a graced imagination.

So the child who develops a faculty for creativity in the course of painting classes will subsequently be able to apply that creativity in other fields, whatever their personal vocation might be. One could imagine, for example, that the student who discovers that his personal vocation is to be a software developer, might then humbly and as servant of God, produce new and powerful technology that aids mankind, and is in harmony with the common good. Similarly, the person who is called to motherhood or fatherhood would exercise their graced imagination in bringing up the children well.

Here is a summary of that formation, listed as the disciplines of the conventional Christian artistic training:

The Imitation of a Canon — the drawing and painting of a canon of great works of accepted past masters in the tradition. This engenders humility and a deep understanding of how great people have created art before them.

The Imitation of Nature — the drawing and painting of nature. This is studying the work of the Master Himself. Again it engenders a humility in that the artist must conform to reality. The humble artist is more likely to follow inspiration should God choose to give it to him.

A Catholic Inculturation — the study of all Catholic culture, including but not limited to painting. This is enhancing the students’ understanding and appreciation of Catholic culture in such a way that he understands its importance in a Christian society, and his place in contributing to it.

The Study of the Mathematics of Beauty — the study of the quadrivium and of sacred number. The four mathematical liberal arts of cosmology, geometry, arithmetic and music with a particular emphasis on how this numerical language articulates divine beauty. The study of sacred number involves understanding the symbolic quality of number in the Christian tradition. This is another ordering principle, again ordered by scripture as commented on by the Church Fathers, for the imagination.

Spiritual development — catechesis to the rites of initiation in the Church, and thereafter after a continuing catechesis - known as mystagogical catechesis - that directs the student to a deeping grasp and participation in her mysteries. This is the formation that involves the deep engagement with scripture and a grasp of Salvation History as described above.

Going beyond Imitation — The practice of the creation of beauty, through imagining and incarnating beautiful ideas as paintings. The best artist is not a pure copyist, but rather through the good use of imagination, raises up what he sees through partial abstraction and modification of what is seen so as to reveal invisible truths through the visible means of visual art. This is how, for example, the best artists can paint a portrait and communicate to us that this person is alive and has a soul, and is not simply a perfect wax model of person.

Copying existing works of art. This is someone learning the Academic Method of art trainging developed in the 16th century.

Rigorous study of nature: A figure study using the Academic Method.

Beauty and Creativity in Scientific Research

How Pythagoras’ ideas predicted the existence of subatomic particles 2,500 years ago. And how Christianity has bridged the gap between ancient Greece and the particle accelerator.

In a recent posting of my conversation with Brandon Vaidyanathan on Science, Art and the Sacred, I described the process of the discovery of a quark by Murrey Gell-Mann in the early 1960s, and how the creative process which he used evoked the ideas of Pythagoras from many centuries earlier. I thought it would be worth talking about this a little more.

In the book of Prophet Daniel, the Septuagint translation has a Canticle sung by the three young men who were thrown into the fiery furnace by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. God saved them from death in the flames, and they sang a song of praise to the Creator of all. The song of the three young men is chanted regularly in the Divine Office, and in it, each aspect of Creation is depicted as praising God, in turn: the frosts, hail and snow, wind and rain and all the other inanimate aspects of creation listed in this canticle do not give praise to God literally, but through their beauty they direct our praise to God. The cosmos is made for us.

The Three Young Men in the Furnace, a fresco from the Roman catacombs

Through reflection on the beauty and order of Creation, men through centuries, both Christian and non-Christian, have seen a sign of a divine Creator, and been moved to worship Him. This impulse is called by St Thomas Aquinas the virtue of religion. Man’s reason is weak, and it is only through Revelation that we have been able to know who that God is and how to worship Him authentically. That form of worship is passed down to us through God’s Church today, and includes of course, the Canticle of Daniel described above.

In this sense, therefore, we can think of the whole of Creation as being ordered liturgically, in that it directs us to God and to the thanks, praise and glory that is due to Him.

This canticle predates Christianity, coming from a time when the detail of material facts known about the cosmos was far less that it is today. Some think that modern advances in natural science undermine this instinct for awe and wonder. However, when the advances in scientific knowledge are viewed with the eyes of faith, they only serve, it seems to me, to reinforce the sense that Creation is ordered and beautiful. So for me, as one who studied physics at university, the awareness of scientific description of the universe increases my faith and the belief in a Creator who made it all.

Perhaps we could revise and create a new canticle based on that of the three children, in which we urge all the newly discovered galaxies, stars, black holes and at the other end of scale of size, molecules, atoms and sub-atomic particles, such as quarks, to give praise to the Lord.

For those who doubt that there is a connection between the old and new way of analyzing and describing the universe, I would like to draw your attention to the story of the discovery of a sub-atomic particle by Murray Gell-Mann.

In his book Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, on the consistency between the Faith and the discoveries of science, Stephen M Barr describes the scientific investigation of a grouping of sub-atomic particles which he refers to as a ‘multiplet’ of ‘hadronic particles’. He describes how when different properties, called ‘flavours’ of ‘SU(3) symmetry’, of nine of these particles were plotted mathematically, then they produced a patterned arrangement that looked like a triangle with the tip missing.

‘Without knowing anything about SU(3) symmetry, one could guess just from the shape of the multiplet diagram that there should be a tenth kind of particle with properties that allow it to be placed down at the bottom to complete the triangle pattern. This is not just a matter of aesthetics; the SU(3) symmetries require it. It can be shown from the SU(3) that the multiplets can only come in certain sizes. … On the basis of SU(3) symmetry Murray Gell-Man predicted in 1962 that there must exist a particle with the right properties to fill out this decuplet. Shortly thereafter, the new particle, called the Ωˉ was indeed discovered.’

This result would have been of no surprise to anyone who had undergone an education in beauty based upon the quadrivium, - the ‘four ways’ - of the seven liberal arts of education in the Middle Ages. (For more details of the quadrivium read my book, The Way of Beauty.) The shape that Murray Gell-Man’s work completed was the triangular arrangement of 10 points known as the tetractys. This is the triangular arrangement of the number 10 in a series of 1:2:3:4.

1, 2, 3 and 4 are the first four numbers that symbolize the creation of the cosmos in three dimensions generated from the unity of God; with notes produced by plucking strings of these relative lengths, we can construct the three fundamental harmonies of the musical scale. The importance of this in the Christian tradition is indicated by the fact that Raphael’s School of Athens fresco, which is in the Vatican, portrays Pythagoras the Greek philosopher.

Pythagoras ideas were the basis of pre-Christian ideas of harmony and order in the cosmos, which were subsequently integrated into Christian thought by figures such as Augustine and Boethius, as described by Benedict XVI in his book The Spirit of the Liturgy. The thought of these pre-Christian classical philosophers, and especially of Aristotle, became, when integrated with Christian Revelation, the basis of the modern scientific method.

In Raphael’s fresco, Pythagoras is portrayed looking at a chalkboard, with a diagram of the tetractys and X, the Roman number 10. (Above it on the chalkboard is the diagram which is a geometric construction of the musical harmonies, again see my book the Way of Beauty for a deeper description of this.)

The idea that the tetractys might be governing the arrangements of properties of these sub-atomic particles does not prove that Pythagoras’ ideas were correct (although I do find it intriguing!). Nor is knowledge of the tetractys even necessary to see the missing dot in this case; as Barr points out, most people would assume it when they look at the incomplete graph. But it is obvious that it only works on the assumption that nature is ordered symmetrically, and as Barr points out, the fact that we see the symmetry in nature seems to be part of human nature.

In regard to the discovery of the sub-atomic particle, once Gell-Man adopted this assumption of the symmetry of the physical world, his intuition gave him the missing point.

This intuitive leap - an educated guess - is always the first step in any creative process, and in order to make such a leap we need a natural sense, in any situation, of what is needed to complete the pattern. This is the creative process: we come up first with an idea of what we think it might be, and then test it with reason.

I do not have a deep knowledge of particle physics, (it is a long time since I studied it university and I wasn’t the greatest student even then). But I doubt that the traditional quadrivium contains the full range of symmetries that one is likely to see and would need to use as a research particle physicist. Nevertheless, I would maintain that the traditional education in the quadrivium would enable the research scientist to be more creative in his work, for it would stimulate in us that mode of looking that engenders creativity. A traditional education in beauty, which is what this is, trains the mind to work in conformity to the divine order, to which, in turn, the natural order conforms.

Physicist A. Zee put it this: 

‘Symmetries have played an increasingly central role in our understanding of the physical world. From rotational symmetry physicists went on to formulate ever more abstruse symmetries…fundamental physicists are sustained by the faith that the ultimate design is suffused with symmetries.Contemporary physics would not have been possible without symmetries to guide us…Learning from Einstein, physicists impose symmetry and see that a unified conception of the physical world may be possible. They hear symmetries whispered in their ears. As physics moves further away from everyday experience and closer to the mind of the Ultimate Designer, our minds are trained away from their familiar moorings…The point to appreciate is that contemporary theories, such as grand unification or superstring, have such rich and intricate mathematical structures that physicists must martial the full force of symmetry to construct them. They cannot be dreamed up out of the blue, nor can they be constructed by laboriously fitting one experimental fact after another. These theories are dictated by Symmetry.’ (A Zee: Fearful Symmetry, the Search for Beauty in Modern Physics (New York, Macmillan, 1986) p281. Quoted by Stephen M Barr in A Student Guide to Natural Science (Delaware, ISI Books, 1986) p71.))

Such a mind, one that is in tune with symmetry, and is open, futher, to inspiration from the Creator, is more likely to make the necessary intuitive leap when placed with an array of data. The mind that habitually looks to the divine symmetry is more likely to see the natural symmetry. This is supernatural creativity and it is open to all of us if we seek to cooperate with God’s grace.

And what has this to do with the liturgy?

The traditional quadrivium is essentially the study of pattern, harmony, symmetry and order in nature and mathematics, viewed as a reflection of the Divine Order. When we perceive something that reflects this order, we call it beautiful. For the Christian, this is the source, along with Tradition, that provides the model upon which the rhythms and cycles of the liturgy are based. Christian culture, like classical culture before it, was also patterned after this cosmic order, which provides the unifying principle that runs through every traditional discipline. Literature, art, music, architecture, philosophy – all of creation and potentially all human activity – are bound together by this common harmony and receive their fullest meaning in the liturgy.

When we apprehend beauty, we do so intuitively. So an education that improves our ability to apprehend beauty also develops our intuition, and bringing our ideas into reality through, for example, the creation of the fine arts and crafts will enhance our ability to be creative. All creativity is at source an intuitive process. This means that professionals in any field, including business and science, would benefit from an education in beauty, because it would develop their creativity. Furthermore, the creativity that an education in beauty stimulates will generate not just more ideas, but better ideas: better, because they are more in harmony with the natural order and with the common good. The recognition of beauty moves us to love what we see. So such an education would therefore also develop our capacity to love, and leave us more inclined to the serve God and our fellow man. The highest activity of all is the worship of God in the sacred liturgy, and the end result for the individual who follows this path well and sincerely is joy.

When a person habitually orders his life liturgically, he will tap into this creative force, for he will be inspired by the Creator.

Therefore, I feel moved, creatively, to promote myself as the poet laureate of sub-atomic physics, by suggesting an addition to the Canticle of Daniel: 

‘Oh you multiples of hadronic particles, give praise to the Lord. To Him be highest glory and praise forever.’

The figure-of-eight particle accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), Batavia, Illinois, USA. Shut down in 2011

..and the Creator, the Eight Day - Jesus Christ, painting by David Clayton is at the Maryvale Institute in Birmingham, England.

Can Modernity Bring Anything to the Liturgy?

Photo by Lucas Carl on Unsplash

Today’s revival of traditional approaches in the fine arts and particularly of traditional liturgical practices has been greeted by many with skepticism and disapproval. “Surely, it is not possible to ‘go back’ to an earlier age, whose ideals are so different from ours? Have we not made significant progress in doing what none could do before? As for anything we might need, it will not be what former generations needed.”

The history of the arts and of reform/renewal movements tells a different tale. All great artists began by apprenticing themselves to a tradition and copying its masterpieces. In like manner, all great movements of reform in Church history looked back for inspiration to what worked in the past in order to fix what was broken in the present. The noble cultural ideals of Western civilization — largely imparted to it by the vigorous activity of the Catholic Church — are possessed of a perennial vitality and creative fecundity against which the self-consciously “modern,” with its fading faddishness, cannot successfully compete.

The reinveintion of the liturgy after the Council was merely the last and most tragic of a long series of unnatural dislocations and distortions of human forms in the 20th century. This was a century that prided itself on taking everything apart, breaking it down, and gutting it out: first painting and poetry, then dance and music, social customs, politics, education. It was only a matter of time before the liturgy, the cumulative and culminating art form, the king in his court, was also deposed. Once all the subsidiary arts, both material and spiritual, that made liturgy possible were reviled and denied, how could liturgy itself stand? If all of culture was declining throughout the modern period, how could liturgy — that supreme expression and concentration of culture — be left unaffected? Would there not be a terrible risk that men without chests and without taste would eventually hold the reins of power and change it to reflect their simplistic rationality? And so it happened.

In the aftermath of this sad story, is it inopportune and premature to ask whether or not there might be something, anything, that modernity can bring to Catholic ritual in a positive sense? Let me explain the basis for the question.

Each era seems to have added — one might say, grafted — something distinctive onto the tradition. The Christians of the Middle Ages were masters of symbol, Scripture, and allegory, and gave us rites and commentaries in that spirit. The medieval liturgy in its tropes, ritual elaboration, architectural framework, and commentary tradition, is an exquisite glorification of the sacrifice on which salvation history centers. The Baroque brings something startlingly new: the unveiled sanctuary, the focus on ecstatic vision and overwhelming sensual experience, even a surprising penchant for the dramatic (i.e., stages, machines, flying angels for the Forty Hours’ devotion). In one way, it is a departure from tradition, even in some way a narrowing, as the Neo-Classical and humanist mind shied away from the dense layers of Scripture and mystery in medieval liturgy and tended toward an “open” sanctuary, emphasizing in ritual the adoration of Christ in His Real Presence rather than placing weight on the many symbolic words and gestures of the rites. Nevertheless, all of this seemed well-suited to the times, fruitful in sanctity, and eventually absorbed into our heritage.

It is a sign of vitality and true mastery of the tradition to be able to enrich it with the gifts of one’s own time. Every vigorous age has produced its own liturgical spirit and forms. Could modernity, too, add to the tradition, enriching it? Has it any legitimate aspirations? Can the excruciating pains and confusion expressed in modernist literature and architecture be given some liturgical answer, spoken in the same dialect? We might look to the composer Arvo Pärt as an example: his music is distinctly modern, but also grounded in tradition. Is there a liturgical analogy to Pärt? What might it look like?

Would that a positive answer were easier to give. “Modernity” is, or at least has been characterized by, waves of disorder: the progressive dismantling, doubting, destabilizing, and distorting of elements that were deemed inopportune, inefficient, oppressive, clericalist, etc. It is defined by its rebellion against classical and Christian order. This is unmistakably seen in the fine arts. Atonal music is defined with an alpha privative. Abstract art is not representational, not recognizable, not indwelling in this world, but flying off to some uninhabitable world where man cannot dwell, a cold planet hung in empty space, lacking water or life. Moreover, since modernity is not one positive spiritual-cultural force, the way that (say) English Gothic and French Baroque were, it is hard to see how it could exercise causality per se. Privation does not act.

Leaving it at this point would, however, be too pessimistic. Human nature and God’s grace reassert themselves. Past culture never completely dies out but is passed along in the “genes” of a society or a civilization. “Modernity,” whatever it means, includes within it that which is not rebellious, not unnatural, not privative, but rather in a loose continuity with the preceding cultural matrix, with some openness to the transcendent, like poor soil still capable of nourishing a plant, awaiting the sower and the seed. This, it seems to me, explains why young people can encounter the traditional liturgy, which is so very unmodern, and immediately resonate with it. In a corner of modern man’s soul is found a desire, vague and tentative though it may be, to escape from the prison that recent generations have built.

Perhaps this, then, is a special grace of modernity: it has placed people into a hunger and thirst for expressions of the sacred and the divine that lift them out of the horizontal immanent void and confront them with the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the overpowering and the alluring. Would we not be in a better position than any earlier generation to be struck by such a thing — what Benedict XVI called “the shock of the beautiful” — since we no longer live familiarly with it, take it for granted, or even expect to have it around us?

Now, of course, I’m not one to say that men of today are essentially different from their predecessors, such that they would need something radically different in their Catholicism from the ample treasury already at hand in our tradition. The tradition as it is can save him, whether in its more monastic-medieval or more Baroque instantiation. Love of the Church’s tradition is always totally contemporary and totally ageless. Modern man needs what every man needs — or even more of it! — and that is sacredness, solemnity, beauty, and a deep sense of connection with the human race, the Church, and his fellows. Only the use of the same fundamental forms of life, worship, and art, however varied in presentation, can accomplish this diachronic and synchronic unity.

My answer, then, to the question posed in the title would be this. Modernity left the Church a long time ago; it partly fled in rebellion, and was partly driven forth as a demon. It can therefore contribute nothing to the restoration of the sacred. All it can do is bring moderns to the Church’s threshold, and leave them there, like orphans abandoned on the doorstep of a convent. The traditional sacred liturgy will take them up in its arms and provide for their healing and elevation. It is our job to let ourselves be cared for (yes, that will take swallowing some pride), and if the Lord deigns to raise up a new Christendom over many centuries, He will give us the light and strength right now to play our small part in paving the way for its emergence.

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s website, SoundCloud page, and YouTube channel.

This stained glass window, to me, speaks volumes...

Re-Published Series of Essays by Fr. Vincent McNabb O.P.

God’s Dealings with the Minds of Men: Essays in Biblical Inspiration, Mysticism, and the Imagination by Fr Vincent McNabb, O.P., available online here.

Vincent McNabb, O.P. (1868-1943), is perhaps best known today as one of the fathers of the Catholic Land and Distributist movements. Irish by birth, he would join the English Province Dominicans as a young man and spend much of his life in England, where he became friends with another leader of the Distributist movement, G.K. Chesterton. He also spent periods living and teaching in the United States, and through this, as much as through his writing and close association with Chesterton, became known to American Catholics.

Less appreciated now is that McNabb, a well-rounded theologian steeped (as one might expect of a Dominican) in the works and method of St Thomas Aquinas, wrote extensively not just on agrarianism and economics, but on a wide range of issues. In this collection of essays, first published in 1903 under the title Where Believers May Doubt, he addresses subjects with which his name is no longer usually associated: the distinction between divine revelation and inspiration, the nature of mysticism, the challenges that imagination can pose for belief, and the relationship between theology and natural science. Some of these topics have been, and continue to be, the objects of contentious debate, and the insights that McNabb offers in regard to each of them remain relevant in the present day.

For example, the manner and extent to which modern historical-critical methods of approaching the Bible can be harmonized with the traditional approach to Sacred Scripture taken by the Church Fathers continue to be a live issue for Catholics. (No less a thinker than Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has seen fit to devote his attention to it in recent years.) McNabb ventures into these dangerous waters; the result is two thought-provoking essays on inspiration and revelation, in which he manages to avoid the excesses of an extreme literalism that would ignore the insights of modern scholarship, and of a critical approach that would compromise the Catholic Faith.

Another example: 20th-century Thomists Norris Clarke, S.J., and Cornelio Fabro, C.S.S., encouraged the creative retrieval of St Thomas in light of the data of modern science. Decades before either of them had begun his scholarly career, McNabb was endeavoring carefully to show the significance of St Thomas’s understanding of the Biblical account of creation to the possibility of reconciling the discoveries of modern science with the truths of divine revelation.

In other interventions, McNabb offers general principles that are readily applicable to the modern-day problem of how to re-evangelize an increasingly post-Christian culture. His essays on the topics of mysticism and the imagination are particularly relevant here.

At the conclusion of his essay on mysticism, McNabb laments the “sad dearth” in the modern age “of that truly Christian luxury, the Mysticism of Christ’s Saints.” The qualifier is important: one of the questions to which McNabb will turn his attention in the essay is that of how to distinguish between true and false mysticism.

In the first decades of the 21st century, mysticism of a sort is apparently not all that uncommon. According to a 2009 study conducted by the Pew Research Center, 49% of Americans surveyed reported having had “a religious or mystical experience, defined as a ‘moment of sudden religious insight or awakening.’ ” Yet the title of the report, “Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths,” should give Catholics pause. Distinguishing between true and false mysticism is no less imperative today than it was when McNabb’s essay was first published.

Imagination, too, is presently a topic of significance in the Catholic milieu. Many Catholics today regard beauty as a forgotten quality and insist that we must rediscover ways to harness its power so that creative Catholic can once again become cultural leaders in a secular world. In this way, it is envisaged, the Church will be able to draw people to the Faith by manifesting the glory of God in all things, and especially in the everyday aspects of life. For those invested in the rediscovery of beauty, discussions regarding the place of the “Catholic imagination” in artistic creativity are commonplace. All too often, the investigation of these questions is distorted and misdirected by an adoption, usually unconscious, on the part of the investigator of aspects of the Romantic ethos that still dominates the secular worldview. The result is an approach that overplays the role of emotion in creativity. This is common, in my experience, even for Catholics who would consider themselves orthodox, even traditionalist, in their faith, and who might even argue their point of view with the aid of scholastic terminology.

The approach of Fr McNabb is a refreshing antidote to this tendency. While he is interested in the positive role of the imagination in creativity, he is just as quick to warn against the possibility of its undermining right reason at the foundational level. This line of thinking leads him to some conclusions that may surprise the 21st-century reader—for instance, that “[o]ne of the most common triumphs of the imagination is the disdain felt for miracles.” This stands in stark contrast to the assertion that one frequently encounters today, that such disdain comes about for the opposite reason, due not to the use of an overly wild imagination, but to its suppression.

Similarly, for McNabb, a poem is a work not purely of the imagination, but—fundamentally—of reason. The imagination has a role to play in setting the poet off in the right direction, but it is right reason that ensures that he expresses what is true and, hence, beautiful. Some creatives today, Catholic and otherwise, may regard this judgment as a dismissal of the art of writing from one who is himself unimaginative, but that is not so. McNabb was a lover of poetry and wrote regularly and insightfully on the subject. His desire was to understand deeply, perhaps more deeply than some would appreciate, how the poet can create under the guidance of inspiration and use both the imagination and reason in harmony.

These are lessons that contemporary artists in any creative discipline would do well to learn.

You can view and order online here.