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 in the Spiritual Life, Part 1 - Beauty as a Principle of Choice

This is the first of three postings on beauty as a principle of choice. We are used to the idea that the conscience can act in a prohibitive sense as an inner voice that warns us against sinful acts, what we might term the moral conscience. But there is another principle of choice that is more positive and affirmative, a creative impulse in our lives that works in harmony with the order that underlies the beauty of all things. This might be called an impulse for beauty or perhaps a ‘conscience of creativity’ in us, which operates rather like the moral conscience in that it guides choice. In the properly ordered person, it acts in harmony with the moral conscience to take us on the via pulchritudinis, which is the path of greatest joy and holiness to God.

In Part 1, I develop the idea of the impulse for beauty; next week in Part 2, I will suggest ways in which the creative impulse for beauty can be stimulated and formed in our own lives. In Part 3, as a meditation on the themes outlined, I will focus on a single painting of the Sacred Heart of Jesus which is embedded with design principles that conform to the pattern of beauty that can permeate our lives.

The greatest work of art that any artist can create is himself. In this sense, we are all artists who make something of our lives and of ourselves as human persons, and to the degree that we do so in accordance with God’s will and in cooperation with grace, we are beautiful in our humanity.

Even for one who is an artist in the usual sense of the word - who creates paintings for a living - the beautiful person he can be is of far more value than Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi, which sold at auction 3½ years for over $450 million!

The art is important, of course, but just as important is the impact that the making of it has on the artist himself. The virtuous artist creates beautiful art both in order that he might be perfected in Christ by doing so, and so that the art he creates might in turn inspire those who see it to the virtuous life. A life of virtue is a life of love, and because beauty is the radiance of love, the life of love is also a beautiful life.

The Artist Morot in His Studio, by Gustave Caillebotte, ca. 1874 (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons)

Choosing the Way of Beauty

When we are faced with different possible courses of action in which there is no clear moral judgment to be made, we imagine the result of taking each option and then, comparing them to each other, choose the one that seems to be the best. That judgment is made by that part of us that apprehends beauty and anticipates what might be beautiful in the future by engaging our imaginations. For the artist, this relates directly to the decisions he makes in creating art. For the patron of art, it governs the choices of those who appreciate and choose art. But for all of us, it is employed in many other, less obviously art-related situations, and has an impact on our lives in a wider and perhaps unexpected sense.

In the course of a day, we make perhaps thousands of decisions about what action to take at any particular moment. Many of these might appear to be morally neutral, in the sense that they do not contravene moral law as we understand it, but that doesn’t mean they are all equally good for us. For the most part, in the ordinary activities of day-to-day life, we decide intuitively or impulsively what we believe will make us happiest, which is the most beautiful choice. It is the “conscience of creativity” that guides us on these occasions. When we choose well, we are traveling on the Way of Beauty, which is the most joyful and attractive path any of us can take to God.

The interplay between the impulse for beauty and the moral conscience

It is an axiomatic principle that we aim to do good and avoid evil. Most of us will be used to the idea that morality is about avoiding evil. The Ten Commandments, which are the foundation of Christian moral conduct, are prohibitive. As such, they are a collection of Thou-shalt-nots that, in effect, tell us what not to do. But once the no-go areas of our personal conduct are defined then we are faced with the additional task of doing good. We look at the situation ahead of us and aim to do the best of which we are capable. This last choice requires judgment and is the right exercise of freedom. We must assess at any given moment what is best for ourselves and our neighbors. In this case, we need some positive principles to govern our actions that tell us, very broadly what to do.

The impulse for beauty will, in the ideal, act in harmony with the moral conscience, each complementing the other. It is possible, of course, for one to be more developed than the other in a particular person. There are, for example, artists who create beautiful art but whose personal lives are immoral and unhappy. This is the stereotypical Bohemian self-indulgent artist. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray was about this contrast between the beauty of a man’s outward appearance and his inner life; the portrait of a beautiful young man, Dorian Gray, was hidden from view, and over time, mysteriously became more and more ugly, reflecting the increasingly sinful distortion of the inner life of the real person it portrays. Dorian Gray himself became steadily more evil in his actions, but in contrast, remained outwardly youthful and beautiful. Anyone who was able to see the whole person would have seen a Dorian Gray who resembled a portrait by Francis-Bacon.

Three studies for a Portrait, by Francis Bacon, 1963, British

At the other extreme, some might rarely contravene moral law, but have the prohibitive mindset so deeply ingrained in them that they are at times paralyzed by indecision and unable to choose the best from an array of morally neutral choices for fear of getting it “wrong.” Those of us who wish to be pious Catholics might have been in this situation ourselves. Even if we are otherwise observant Christians, if our principle of choice is dominating unduly by the desire to avoid evil, we are not living the lives to which Christ calls us. This life-fearful analysis-paralysis can make us as miserable as a life of self-indulgence.

We are each called to travel a unique and personal path to God, and to be on that path is the source of greatest joy for us in this life. This is the path that we follow when both our moral consciences and impulses for beauty are engaged. The path can be discerned and chosen deliberately, to some extent, but it can also be discovered. To the degree that we allow the impulse for beauty to order our lives to choose the practicable best, the most loving, the most gracious, and the most beautiful actions in day-to-day living, we will discover that path, one small step at a time.

So our motto might be modified to become: avoid evil, do good, and do what is the most beautiful...as best we can!

A moment of indecision? The Artist in His Studio by John Singer Sargent

To escape the trap of an overly narrow focus on the prohibitive mindset of avoiding evil, it can be helpful to widen and soften, so to speak, our understanding of sin. Sin can be, of course, what it is commonly held to be: the breaking of the rules of morality. But sin can also be understood as a partial rupture of our relationship with God in which there is no clear breaking of rules, but in which our lives are not as ordered as they could be. Our relationship with God might still be good, but if not fully ordered to him, it is not as good as it could be. That being the case, we are not as happy as we could be. The cause of ruptures and lack of order is our self-centeredness (just as with transgressions of the moral law) and these can be both voluntary and involuntary. Of course, we will never be fully happy until the next life, but we can, with God’s grace, reorder our lives by degrees in this life so as to be happier and more fulfilled; the well-developed impulse for beauty will help us to do so.

St Augustine summed up this dialectic between the moral conscience and the conscience of creativity by saying (in his commentary on 1 John 4, 12): “Love, and do what you want.” This is not to be taken as license. Those who love well love God first, and do not want to do anything contrary to His will. After all, we are also told, “If you love me, keep my commandments.” (John 14, 15). To the degree that our lives are rooted in a love for God first, then what we want will be loving, graceful, and ordered to Him; and then we are on that Way of Beauty and we draw others to the source of that beauty, Jesus Christ.

The Need to Develop the Impulse for Beauty
It sounds simple. Avoid evil, do good, choose the most beautiful path ahead, and all will be well! The only difficulty is that we each have different abilities to apprehend beauty, and therefore, cannot always be sure that we can trust our own judgments. Just as our fallen natures and cultural influences can distort our perceptions of what is good and true, they can diminish our abilities to apprehend beauty too. We need to find a way, therefore, to develop our capacity to recognize what is truly beautiful in order to be able to follow the Way of Beauty. The answer lies, I believe in the traditional formation of Catholic artists and a traditional Catholic education that transmits the essentials of the practice of our faith.

More on that in Part 2.

If Ye Love Me, by Thomas Tallis - A meditation on the source of beauty, set to beautiful music, and sung beautifully: beauty begets beauty!

Hale and Hearty - Health and Beauty in the Human Person, Part 2

Does it help a doctor to treat the patient if he appreciates the beauty of the person and relates to him as a Christian? I think so.

In this article, I argue that the best doctors will be aware of what human health is to be able to treat them. Furthermore, to know what health is requires them to understand what a human person is, which means the study and acceptance of Christian anthropology. I argue that the very best doctor - or health practitioner of any description - will do more than grasp this intellectually, but will relate to the patient as a human person. To relate with a patient fully involves more than simply the adoption of Christian morality. It is a Christian formation, with the liturgy and mystagogical catechesis at its heart that will most powerfully form a good doctor.

In the first part of this article, I tried to establish a good working definition of health. In this part, I discuss why the best doctor, one who can help a patient to achieve this ideal, will be one who relates to others as a Christian. I explain why, in my view, such a doctor will be one who deeply appreciates also the beauty of the human person and is formed supernaturally as a Christian through a mystagogical catechesis with the worship of God at its heart. I begin from the definition of health that established at the end of part one.

Plastic surgery is the response of the modern medical profession to the question of human beauty. The best doctors, I suggest, appreciate the beauty of the human person in a way that is not limited to physical attractiveness.

A proposed definition of health
Reflecting on all of this so far, here is a proposed definition of health: health is the harmony of all aspects of the human person - body, soul, and spirit - in accordance with our freedom to choose happiness both now and in eternity. Healthcare, regardless of what particular aspect of the human person it is focussed on is always concerned, therefore, with the treatment of the whole person and the optimization of that freedom to choose happiness.

Happiness. What is it and how do we get it?
What we all seek is happiness, and as Aristotle points out, every choice we make is done with a view to increasing our happiness. The doctor cannot prescribe happiness, but he can contribute to the freedom of the person to choose it if he knows what happiness is and what is necessary to obtain it. The source of the difficulty in defining precisely well-being and health relate with all its ramifications, I suggest, is at root a reluctance to acknowledge a fundamental truth, that happiness is what we seek in this life and the next, and that God made us that way so that we might seek Him.

Happiness is one of those words that is almost impossible to define without descending into circular definitions of the sort that we have already encountered. An inability to define the word doesn’t mean that we don’t know what it is, however. Most people who could not define it would nevertheless say that we know it when we get it, and we know when we don’t have it. Also, most people can naturally distinguish between various degrees of superficial or temporary happiness. All forms of happiness are desirable and good, but not all fulfill the desire for a deep and permanent happiness that is in our hearts.

I would make the case that happiness is in fact, indefinable - ineffable - that is, beyond words. This is a mystery that need not worry us however, for what we desire is available to all of us. I quote here from the Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann (d.1983):

‘The ultimate mystery of the Church consists in knowing the Holy Spirit, in receiving Him, in being in Communion with Him. It is He (and not ‘grace’) that we invoke in prayer and acquire through spiritual effort..‘For in the words of St Seraphim [of Sarov] “when the Spirit of God descends upon man and overshadows him with the fullness of His outpouring, then the human soul overflows with unspeakable joy because the Spirit of God turns to joy all that he may touch.”

‘All this means that we know the Holy Spirit only by His presence in us, the presence manifested above all in ineffable joy, peace, and fullness. Even in ordinary human language these words - joy, peace, fullness - refer to something which is precisely ineffable, which by its very nature is beyond words, definitions, and descriptions. They refer to those moments in life when life is full of life when there is no lack of and therefore no desire for anything, and this no anxiety, no fear, no frustration. Man always speaks of happiness, and indeed life is a pursuit of happiness a longing of life’s self-fulfillment. Thus one can say that the presence of the Holy Spirit in us is the fulfillment of true happiness. And since this happiness does not come from an identifiable and external cause as does our poor and worldly happiness, which disappears with the disappearance of the cause that produced it, and since it does not come from anything in this world, yet results in a joy about everything, that happiness must be the fruit in us of the coming, the presence, the abiding of someone who Himself is Life, Joy, Peace, Beauty, Fullness, Bliss. This Someone is the Holy Spirit.’

The miraculous event at Pentecost is a sign of what is available to us as Christians. The gift of divine wisdom, a gift of the Holy Spirit, is the end of all Christian education, and so ought to be incorporated into the formation of health workers too!

Treating the whole person
Given the profound unity of the human person, a single entity that is body, soul, and spirit and in which each aspect bound up with the other. There is no treating part of the person without treating the whole person, and a doctor’s treatment of the person is incomplete if it is not in accord with our desire for God.

This is about more than medical ethics. It is governed by the first assumptions of what the person is. A doctor may know all the practices of medicine, but he cannot know how to apply them properly if he doesn’t understand what makes a person free to choose happiness.

Getting the heart of the matter: the human heart used to be organ that symbolized the place where we are, as a person, the vector sum of all our thoughts, feelings and actions. Modern medicine treats it as a machine and represents it mathematically as a series of functions. This approach is good for treating heart disease, but it could be better if all this data was understood in relation to the well-being of the whole person. 

The ancient Greeks, it appears, had a greater grasp of this idea of the need for the harmony of the parts than the specialists of modern secular medicine. Their general mathematical theory of harmony and proportion began with the consideration of the beauty of things, and the realization that when we recognize that the relationship of the parts to each other is ordered to the whole and to its purpose we see it as both beautiful and good. So the consideration of what things are begins with the recognition of their beauty as a sign of their goodness. This applies to both mankind and creation. Greek medicine considered health to be the balance of the parts and ill-health, it was assumed, could be linked to an imbalance. An example would be their approach to the four ‘humors’ - yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, blood. They understood also the profound unity of the physical and spiritual, so they tried to consider how an imbalance of these humors might lead to an emotional imbalance. It is from this that we still have words in the English language related to mood or character such as bilious, phlegmatic, or sanguine (the last from “sanguis”, the Latin word for blood).

In regard to the moral life, Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics (a book still studied in Catholic liberal arts colleges today), directly links virtuous behavior to a proportional relationship between extremes, citing arithmetic and geometric proportions. Many people read this and think that he is speaking loosely or figuratively, but he uses these terms with precise meanings in mind. (If you want to understand how, you can read of the mathematics of proportion and harmony in Boethius’s De Institione Arithemetica and De Institutione Musica, or my summarization of those principles in The Way of Beauty. These are also taught in my class offered by Pontifex University, called The Mathematics of Beauty.)

In considering the value of what the ancients did in the field of medicine, I am not suggesting that we adopt their scientific understanding of the human person which was inferior to that of the present day. Rather we should think about how this holistic approach to medicine can restore the humane to healthcare. Nor is this an argument for abandoning specialization in medicine. It does seem appropriate for a physician to primarily consider bodily health, but at the same, it seems reasonable to say that he cannot be a good physician without some awareness, at least, of how his specialization relates to the whole.

The modern doctor, for example, very often considers a chemical imbalance and its connection to unhappiness, and prescribes antidepressants. To do this without considering the possibility that a chemical imbalance might be the result of spiritual ills (which is different even from considering it to be a mental problem) could lead to a wrong diagnosis and treatment. Unhappiness, like physical pain, reveals a difficulty and on these occasions treating it with antidepressants might be akin to treating a broken bone with painkillers.

The Sacred Heart, by David Clayton, 20th century. Devotion to the Sacred Heart gives us an appreciation for Christ's humanity. Perhaps also, ironically, by meditation upon the symbol of the heart as the seat of the whole person, it can give us (including those of us who are in the medical professions) an appreciation for the spiritual aspects of man also.

Beauty and Health
Defining health in this way creates a direct connection to our perception of the beauty of the human person. In the traditional Western approach, beauty is the proper ordering of the parts of something in relation to each other, so that the whole is ordered to its purpose. We apprehend that beauty we are discerning this right pattern of the parts to each other and of the whole to its purpose.

Human beauty, therefore, could be defined as the radiance of health.

This definition speaks a deeper recognition of the human person than the superficial recognition of sexual attractiveness, which is a true but incomplete assessment of human beauty. To recognize a person as beautiful in this way - radiantly healthy - is to do more even than to grasp vital information about his health. It must be apprehended by one who appreciates that he is in relation to the person regarded, and is sympathy what those goals are. This is one who loves and who takes delight in the freedom of the other.

There is real value in doctors being formed to see us in this way. For all the blood-pressure readings or vital signs, it is their judgment, formed by experience will tell them in combination with this, just by looking, how healthy a person is. Such a doctor will not only have a heightened sense of when something is wrong, he will naturally look for the restoration of balance and have a sense of how to put the parts together again, so to speak. This requires each doctor and nurse to be, as well as practitioners of medical science, to be mystics and lovers who take an interest in, and ideally even know well the patient as a person.

An education that incorporates a formation in faith and a formation in the apprehension of beauty will increase the chances of the doctor being that person. The best health practitioners will be men and women who strive to be partakers of the divine nature and who can see with the eyes of purity, and so they are kings, priests, and prophets living the life of the Spirit (in common with all Christians). This is why medical training ought not to be separated from a spiritual formation in the Christian life. The good doctor will be a man of love attuned to the beauty of the human person in the way that a mother sees the beauty of her newborn baby.

The Lucca Madonna by Jan Van Eyck, Flemish, 15th century. It is the love of a parent for the child that allows her to see the beauty of a baby in a way that others don't. All people, by virtue of our humanity, are as beautiful as a baby, and it is our lack of love for others that restricts our ability to see it. Nevertheless, the recognition of the beauty of the whole person is an ideal that we can strive for, difficult though it is to achieve.

Clearly, this is asking a lot of our doctors and nurses and something that no training can ever guarantee for them. Medical exams can test knowledge of the information that might aid such a transformation, but they can’t measure the transformation itself. Nevertheless making medical students aware of the principles outlined, and offering them mystagogical catechesis and spiritual guidance directed to these ends should be a matter of policy and I would make it a priority over any other general education, even the traditional Great Books and Liberal Arts programs that American Catholic colleges and universities offer. This is, I suggest, the authentic role of our Newman centers on the university campuses and it is not beyond any of them. I believe that if they were offering this, the uptake would be from a pool far wider than simply medical students!

But let all those that seek thee be joyful and glad in thee, and let all such as delight in thee say always The Lord be praised. (Psalm 70 (69), 4)

Hippocrates (460-370 BC)

Hale and Hearty - Health and Beauty in the Human Person, Part 1

What is health? What does it mean to be healthy? We use the word all the time, but could you define it? And does it even matter?

In this article, I argue that the best doctors will be aware of what human health is to be able to treat them. Furthermore, to know what health is requires them to understand what a human person is, which means the study and acceptance of Christian anthropology. I argue that the very best doctor - or health practitioner of any description - will do more than grasp this intellectually but will relate to the patient as a human person. To relate with a patient fully involves more than simply the adoption of Christian morality. It is a Christian formation, with the liturgy and mystagogical catechesis at its heart that will most powerfully form a good doctor. The article will be presented in two parts. In today's I try to establish a good working definition of health and why it is important to do so. In part two, which will be posted on Thursday, I discuss why the best doctor, one who can help a patient to achieve this ideal, will be one who relates to others as a Christian. I explain why, in my view, such a doctor will be one who deeply appreciates also the beauty of the human person and is formed supernaturally as a Christian through a mystagogical catechesis with the worship of God at its heart.

A Visit to the Quack, by Hogarth, English 18th century. We can expect better today as the treatment of bodily ailments has improved dramatically, but to what end?

Given that health is something we all desire, one would imagine we could say what it is, but in fact and perhaps surprisingly, it’s not that easy. When I looked up the word in an online dictionary it defined it as a negative: a state of being free from illness or injury. This, surely, is inadequate? For while it tells us what we don’t want - illness and injury - it doesn’t define the good that we do want, health.

Philosophically, it seems to be an inversion: the usual approach is to define the good as an entity and consider evil to be a distortion that restricts or reduces what is good. So by this approach, illness, and injury, as human evils, would be defined as privations of health. But if we cannot say what health is, we cannot say what a privation of health is, and accordingly, we can’t say what illness is either. So a definition of health-based upon an absence of something argument is a circular definition, effectively health is the absence of ill-health!

The right wing of Rogier van der Weiden’s Altarpiece of the Seven Sacraments, ca. 1445-50, depicting Holy Orders, Matrimony, and the Anointing of the Sick. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons, cropped.)

Perhaps we might suggest that health is an attribute of the human person that can be equated to a wholeness of being? This seems to be better, but still, it doesn’t quite fit. We can imagine a situation where we have an amputee or a blind man, for example, who would not be considered a whole person, could nevertheless be considered healthy.

Looking further, the World Health Organization - which, given their name, you would think ought to know - defines health as follows: Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Similarly, Medical News Today, in an article aptly entitled, What is Good Health?, defined health as a state of complete emotional and physical well-being. Healthcare exists to help people maintain this optimal state of health.

The Barber Surgeon by Adriaen Brouwer, Flemish, 17th century. If we view limit our idea of the human person to body-as-machine, then aren't our modern doctors just glorified and highly-trained barbers? I would argue so, except that at least the barber is usually sufficiently interested you as a person to ask you where you're going for your holidays. No doctor has ever asked me that! 

These seem to be getting closer, but in order to understand what these definitions really mean, we need to have a clear understanding of what we mean by physical, mental, social or emotional well-being and unless we can do that, we are still stuck. Well-being is described in the dictionary as a state of health, happiness, and prosperity. This still leaves us floundering somewhat with another circular definition: health is well-being and well-being is health.

Well-being as a state of happiness, the second part of the definition above, does seem to be a better starting point; however. I think we can disregard serious consideration of prosperity - success in material terms - which is only important to the degree that it contributes to happiness, as it seems reasonable to assume that the happy person possesses all the prosperity they need.

So while happiness is not the same thing as health, there is a strong connection, and this will be our starting point in the consideration of what health is. In order to establish what that connection is, we need to consider first why it is important to know what health is.

Why worry about the definition of health?
This matters. Unless our healthcare providers have a clear answer as to what health is, precisely, then every time we go to the doctor’s surgery or the hospital we cannot be sure that he really is trying to make us healthy! Try asking your doctor what he thinks health is and you may be disturbed to find out that he doesn’t really know.

I first learned about this anomaly through my own GP, who told me that throughout his medical training he was never formally taught exactly what health is, and that after many years of practicing, it had dawned on him how detrimental this was to healthcare provision in the country.

Most commonly the goal of a doctor’s treatment today is about relief from illness. So the doctor does not assist the patient in his search for the Good, but rather aids his escape from something bad without really concerning himself with where he is going. This is better than nothing, but it does lead to problems. At best each doctor decides for himself what health is, perhaps in consultation with the patient. We cannot establish what the Good is for a human being without consideration of him as a person, body, soul, and spirit. A physician who is trained to treat the body as a mechanical device to be repaired and often it will not occur to him to consider how it relates to the whole person, especially the spiritual aspect.

Blood-letting in the 14th century. Medical science has undoubtedly improved since then, but has the medical profession lost a sense of how to treat the whole person in the process?

As Christians know, the human person is a profound unity of body, soul, and spirit. Modern medical training studiously avoids taking any position on the spiritual well being of the person, and this has profound consequences because there can be no neutrality in this. As in all things, either we are for God, or we are against Him. A philosophy of medical treatment that takes a position of spiritual ‘neutrality’ as one of its foundational premises will inevitably be anti-spiritual, and will undermine the spiritual health of man, leading us to misery.

Doctors today, it seems to me, are trained experts who treat best the particular slice of human nature they are trained to examine, but they do not have sufficient knowledge of how that slice relates to the whole. To be able to make this connection most likely requires a study of Christian anthropology and the integration of this study with their medical training.

A way of summarizing the situation is that modern doctors are able to analyze well but are less able to synthesize. They can treat the parts in isolation, but they are less competent when putting all those parts together.

To illustrate how this can have an impact on physical health alone (without any thought for the spiritual needs of the person at this point), here are two examples. First, in the appendix of my book The Way of Beauty, entitled Liturgy and Intuition, I describe how on a number of occasions nurses in intensive care wards predicted that a patient was going to have a heart attack. The specialist cardiologist would come in to check the readings of all the vital signs, and say, on the contrary to what the nurse was saying, that there was no risk, because all readings were within the defined limits of healthy function. When asked to explain why they were worried for the patient, the nurse couldn’t say, it was simply a conviction that came from intuition. So typically, the doctor ignored the warning; then, as often as not, the patient had a heart attack. Later, it was discovered that while individual readings of heart function were within the limits of safety, there were certain combinations of such readings that were dangerous. The nurses were picking up intuitively the pattern of readings an unhealthy heart, because of their great experience of being with patients. Their experience and intuition were overriding the knowledge given to them in their training.

Here is another example, given to me by a practicing cardiologist. There are four atria in the heart and sometimes a diseased heart can reveal enlarged or diminished atria. In their training, the doctors are taught the ‘healthy’ range of sizes of each individual heart atria. However, he told me, very often there will be situations where one or more of the atria are outside the range of health, but an experienced cardiologist will ignore the reading if they judge, in light of their experience, the pattern of the relationships between one atrium and the three others to be healthy.

So just as all the parts of the heart ought to be in right relation to the others, the heart should be in right relation to the body as a whole, and the body, therefore, should be in right relation to the soul and the spirit. Then each part is in right relation with the whole.

Hugh Laurie in House. The idea of the doctor who is brilliant at what he does but seems to despise his patients and colleagues makes for great drama. But in truth, could such a doctor be even better if he was joyous and Christian? I believe so.

A proposed definition of health
Reflecting on all of this so far, here is a proposed definition of health: health is the harmony of all aspects of the human person - body, soul, and spirit - in accordance with our freedom to choose happiness both now and in eternity. Healthcare, regardless of what particular aspect of the human person it is focussed on is always concerned, therefore, with the treatment of the whole person and the optimization of that freedom to choose happiness.

Part two of this article will be posted on Thursday. ...

Interview with Dr Kwasniewski on “Beauty—God’s Messenger”

NLM readers may wish to know about a new magazine, Calx Mariae, published four times a year by Voice of the Family in the U.K. The editor, Maria Madise, invited me to do an interview on the theme of “Beauty—God’s Messenger,” for the third issue, which recently appeared in print. I hope I am allowed to say, in spite of being a contributor myself, that I find the content and the production values extremely high. It is truly one of the nicest publications I’ve seen in a long time, and a sight for sore eyes in these days of internet-dominated news and features. For subscriptions and copies of individual issues, visit this link.

With the editor’s permission, the full interview is reproduced below.

Maria Madise: Throughout history, the Church has sought out beautiful music, art, architecture and the finest craftsmanship. Why do these things play a crucial role in Catholic spirituality and formation? 

Peter Kwasniewski: The reason is simple: we were made by God as creatures of flesh and blood. We learn through our senses. When God revealed the Law to Moses, He made use of a lofty mountain, lightning, thunder, dark clouds, blood, and stone tablets. When He commanded the building of the tabernacle, He showed the pattern of it in fine detail, demanding the most expensive materials. When God spoke to Elijah, He first made a lot of noise, and then revealed Himself in a “soft, small voice.” When Our Lord wished to give Himself most intimately to His disciples, He used bread and wine, in the midst of a highly structured religious ritual. We can think of thousands of examples from divine revelation of “theophanies,” that is, the manifestation of God in various signs and figures. The Jewish liturgy in temple and synagogue continued this pattern, and obviously Christian liturgy did as well, moved above all by the miracle of the Son of God Himself taking on flesh and blood. The Catholic Faith, with the power of the Incarnation behind it, developed the richest and most beautiful culture the world has ever known—but all in the service of pointing beyond itself, to God.

What is the purpose of beauty? Is it practical or functional?

Beauty is God’s first, last, and most effective messenger. We learn that the world is good and orderly because of the beauty of nature, which we only later come to understand intellectually. And just as we come to know God through His divine artistry, we see the inner beauty of the human person most of all in the great works of human art. A painter like Rembrandt helps us to see the immense, almost heartbreaking beauty of an old man or old woman’s face, which we might otherwise rush past or even find ugly. Christ Himself is “the fairest of the sons of men,” as Scripture says, but He allowed Himself to become “a man of sorrows,” marred beyond belief, to tell us something unforgettable about the invisible Beauty of love, of sacrifice for love. The Church therefore cannot and must not flee from her role of introducing mankind to this immortal Lover, both in the beauties that appeal to our senses, and in the deeper mystery that no sense can reach.

What is the role of beauty in the formation of children and young people? 

The first thing a baby notices in the world is his mother’s face, which establishes a first and permanent vision of beauty—not necessarily as the world sees it, but because love discloses the truth.

As a child grows in the family, his parents have the serious obligation to train him or her in a love of the beautiful by reading good stories, memorizing poetry, putting up good artwork, making art together, and attending liturgy that is outwardly very beautiful, if at all possible. All these things are part of a subtle and pervasive education of taste, sensibility, instinct, and intuition. When we are brought up with beauty, we have a sense of propriety, respect, nobility, dignity. These things are proto-religious or para-religious attitudes that heavily influence the course of one’s life. Without them, we are much more vulnerable to the winds of false doctrine and shoddy excuses.

A typical European street corner

How would you explain to someone what exactly culture is and what is Catholic culture? 

It is not easy to define culture. In a recent lecture I tried my hand at it: culture is “the shared ways in which a society or people is accustomed to expressing, celebrating, and inculcating its vision of reality.” Maybe that’s too broad. Culture is always concerned with the concrete expression of ideas and values. How we eat our food, what we drink and when and why, how we dress and speak, what our buildings and vehicles look like, all this is culture, and does, in fact, express a worldview (or perhaps an eclectic mingling of worldviews).

In Europe above all, Catholics developed an extremely rich culture in which even the littlest objects of daily use were decorated beautifully and often with explicit reference to the doctrines of the Faith. In this way, there was a continuum from the cup at home to the chalice on the altar, from the dinner bell to the cathedral bell, from the tablecloth to the houseling cloth. The images of Our Lady and the saints presided over everything—our familiar companions in this world, but as a reminder that “we have here no abiding city: we seek one that is to come.”

A Catholic culture, then, is what a society inspired by the Faith will produce and cherish: an environment that turns the mind to God gently and frequently, making full use of the high beauties of fine art and the rugged genius of folk art, the impressive pageantry of ceremonial and the stabilizing force of rituals. The result is a joyful impregnation of the whole of life with the immense reality of God, too great to be limited to any domain or any one expression.

Should there be an overlap in liturgical and popular culture? If yes, in what form? If no, why not? 

I think, in fact, it has been a tragedy that high culture and popular culture have parted ways almost completely, and that the liturgy is no longer the driving force of culture, as it had been for well over a thousand years. Today’s “inculturation” is often cheap, random, and secular, because it is not guided by strong and clear thinking rooted in divine revelation and Church tradition.

For example, people try to take contemporary pop music and bring it into the liturgy. This is a giant mistake, because this music is saturated with emotionalism, strongly associated with the liberal anti-culture and its sexual promiscuity. It does exactly the opposite of what church music is supposed to do: raise the mind up to God, purify the heart of disordered affection, discipline the body. Instead of assisting in our assimilation of the Word of God, it rather promotes the secularization of religion.

But it is possible to do inculturation well. The missionaries of Europe who came to the New World often incorporated external features of the evangelized cultures into music, devotions, and visual arts. For instance, Spanish missionaries in Mexico taught the natives how to compose in the style of Renaissance polyphony, but allowed or even encouraged the addition of native flutes and percussion. The result still sounds ecclesiastical, yet with a Central American flavor to it. (If you are interested in listening to some of it, just look up the San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble, or SAVAE.)

Prodigal son as metaphor (detail from Rembrandt)

What is our duty as the heirs of Catholic tradition? Do we need to reform, preserve, or recreate? 

This is an important question. Here is what Our Lord Himself teaches us in the parable of the prodigal son. What we do to, or with, our family inheritance shows what we think of our father and of our entire family. Now, no one can deny that things like Latin, Gregorian chant, and offering Mass ad orientem are central, constitutive, and characteristic treasures of our Catholic patrimony. The liturgical reform suppressed them or marginalized them, acting just like the prodigal son who squandered his family wealth on loose living and ended up impoverished and miserable. The only way out of this bad situation is what the parable shows: conversion, repentance, return, and reestablishment in the house of the father.

The right attitude towards our inheritance is to protect it, preserve it, defend it, and make use of it to the greatest extent possible. To do this, we must know it, and the better we come to know it, the more we will love it. This love, in turn, will inspire new works of beauty in continuity with what has come before. That is the experience of every serious Catholic artist—architect, painter, iconographer, sculptor, composer, poet. Knowing our tradition, we imitate it, emulate it, develop it, and carry it forward into the 21st century. There is no need to seek originality. The only fully original person is God the Father, since He has no origin from anyone else; even the Son is not original, but originated; and the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son. God Himself teaches us that the perfection of all persons after the Father consists in their derivation from another. The creature who tried to be wholly original was Lucifer, of whom Our Lord says that he is “the father of lies” because he “speaks from himself.” That’s where sheer originality will get you: into hell. And that, of course, is what we see in so many modern artists.

Incidentally, Martin Mosebach has made the observation that the notion of reform makes sense only if one takes the word itself seriously: it is a return to form, a re-forming of that which has lost good form. Reform doesn’t mean loosening up, wandering off, or blowing things up. It means more discipline, more attachment to good models, more self-control, more humility in the service of greatness. That’s the kind of reform that the Church always needs, not the “reform” we have gotten in the past half-century, which should more truthfully be called deformation.

How would you describe your own discovery of Catholic tradition and what effect did it have on your formation and work? 

For me, the discovery of Gregorian chant was a huge revelation. I can’t say why I was so fascinated by it at the tender age of 17, but then again, the chant really is mesmerizing and haunting in a way that no other music is. By listening to recordings of the Wiener Hofburgkapelle, I taught myself to read the neumes in an old Graduale Romanum that had been discarded by the Benedictine boys’ school I was attending at the time. I think my study of composition—being introduced to J. S. Bach’s chorales and trying to imitate them in my exercises—also played a role: there is something about this kind of discipline that helps the mind to perceive beauty not as something vague, fluffy, and sentimental, but as the result of labor, craft, rule.

Other important influences at the end of high school included the reading of Plato’s dialogues and Ludwig Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma. At the time, I felt that Plato, though a pagan, was really “one of us”—a sort of “closet Catholic”—and that to be educated meant to read Plato, and authors like him. All this made me want to go to a college where I could be steeped in the riches of Catholicism that I had begun to taste. That’s why I went to Thomas Aquinas College in California, where I could study the “Great Books.”

Attending TAC introduced me to a world of immense depth and beauty. This included the traditional Latin Mass, where all that is purest, loftiest, and loveliest in the Catholic Faith comes to roost. I think of that psalm verse: “Even the sparrow finds herself a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young: Thy altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God” (Ps 83:4 [84:3]). The Mass truly was and must once again become the inspiring force of Catholic culture. Certainly for me and my family, it has been the place where we can make a spiritual home, and where we may bring up our young in the peace and fragrance of Christ.

A prayer corner

So much of modern culture is ugly, even grotesque, many people have a real hunger for what is beautiful and good. Can you suggest how we may satisfy this hunger? 

I strongly believe, as I hinted earlier, that we need to surround ourselves with beauty. I don’t mean in a cluttered or kitschy way, but by suitable decorations, by investing if we can in works of art, by listening to really good music (and by this, I do not mean any particular period, but certainly not pop, rock, rap, techno, or any of that barbaric stuff, which is the musical equivalent of junk food or drugs), and by seeking to understand the greatest art that European and Catholic civilization has bequeathed to us. I would recommend several practical steps.

First, find the most beautiful celebration of the liturgy you can, and go to it. If it’s in a beautiful church, even better! The liturgy is where most of the fine arts blossomed and where they are meant to be experienced: as offerings to God, caught up in (and ideally assisting in) the ascending movement of prayer. The liturgy is not just the “source and summit” of the Christian life, it is also—or it has been and should once again be—the source and summit of Christian culture as well.

Second, think about the rooms you are living and working in, and how you might elevate them with prints, watercolors, engravings, etc. It takes time to find works of ‘original’ art, but in the mean time, or supplementally, a good quality giclee reproduction of a Fra Angelico or a Giotto, a Rembrandt or a Vermeer can make a big difference in the ambience, encouraging a more contemplative spirit. (I recommend The Catholic Art Company, which has a fine selection. They don’t sell junk, and they don’t support immoral causes.)

Third, pick a place in your home and make it the “prayer corner,” with icons or holy images, a candle, holy water, rosaries, flowers. This should be a place around which it is natural to gather for morning or evening prayers. (You can read more about this in David Clayton and Leila Lawler’s The Little Oratory: A Beginner’s Guide to Praying in the Home. Other beautiful customs can develop from this center point; see Mary Reed Newland’s We and Our Children: How to Make a Catholic Home.)

Fourth, acquire some good recordings of sacred and “classical” music, and take time to listen to them, to develop your ear and your soul. (At LifeSite News, I’ve written some pertinent articles: “What makes Gregorian chant uniquely itself—with recommended recordings” and “These new recordings of sacred music will transport you to the courts of the King.”)

Fifth, make time for ongoing education. I cannot recommend highly enough the lectures by art historian William Kloss available from The Great Courses: such eye-opening and fascinating explorations of the genius of the greatest artists, who have a special gift for seeing—and thus, for helping us to see—the luminous depths of reality. Obviously, if one can visit a good or great museum, one should do this on a fairly regular basis.

Sixth, at least once a year, go on pilgrimage. The pilgrim, too, gets to enjoy the sights and sounds of the journey and the destination, but he has a higher purpose than the mere tourist. Aesthetic experience becomes more meaningful when united to the love of God, the practice of religion, and the expression of devotion to a saint and to Our Lord Himself. This is what I loved, by the way, about attending the All Souls Pontifical Requiem Mass at St. John Cantius in Chicago this past November 2nd: the choir and orchestra performed Mozart’s Requiem in its authentic liturgical context. Somehow, hearing it in the right place and at the right time made the music even better.

Seventh, if we have the means, or if we are in a position to influence people of means, we should try to patronize new works of art that are truly beautiful, and if intended for the Church, truly sacred also. I admire clergy and laity who, when a special occasion is coming in the future, commission a piece of music or a painting for the occasion. Obviously, as a composer myself, I recognize that if Catholics stop asking for and expecting good art for the Church, good artists will starve and disappear. The same can be said of supporting music programs and the right kind of church restorations (often undoing the damage wrought by postconciliar iconoclasts).

In your new book Tradition and Sanity you make a number of compelling arguments in favour of returning to the traditional liturgy—not for liturgical or aesthetic reasons alone, but also because the way we live the Sacrifice of the Mass lies at the heart of every aspect of our lives. Could you explain this a little?

In keeping with what I was saying earlier about how a grateful son should approach his father’s house and his family patrimony, I would say that worshiping God with the Roman Catholic liturgy in the form in which it organically developed for a period of over 1,500 years is crucial to having (or, for many, to recovering) a stable identity, a profound spirituality, a sound doctrinal foundation, and a compass for the moral life—this, in addition to the obvious literary and artistic merits that the old liturgy has in itself and has inspired for so many centuries.

Given that Catholicism is inherently a religion of tradition, it should strike us as quite troubling that Catholics of today pray in a manner terribly different from, and even at odds with, how our ancestors prayed, including the vast majority of saints. Either they were wrong and we are the enlightened ones—or, rather more likely, we have gone off the rails in our quest for modernization and need to get back on if we would reach our destination safely. Liturgy is not something that each age needs to redesign and recreate in its own image. On the contrary, the vicissitudes of history are to a large extent transcended in a still point, an immovable center, a pole star from which we can always take our bearings. You could apply to the Mass the Carthusian motto: Stat crux dum volvitur orbis, “the Cross is steady while the world is turning.” This, to my mind, is the reason why the old liturgy is winning so many “converts” today. The world is turning at a mad pace, careening out of control, and unfortunately, because of the conciliar prejudice for aggiornamento, the world has pulled the postconciliar liturgy in its wake, like a moon orbiting a planet. The classic Roman liturgy abides in its grandeur, and seems, perhaps not too surprisingly, more “relevant” to us today than something devised by a committee in the 1960s.

My book goes into all this, but also into the crisis in the papacy and in evangelization, which I believe are linked with this tragic decision to “re-orient” Catholicism along new lines. This has led not to renewal but to accelerating deformation and irrelevance. Thanks be to God, we see a countermovement gaining strength across the world, and characterized by its opposition, point for point, to the official program. That will be the drama of the next decades: how this massive “civil war” inside the Church plays out under the hand of Divine Providence.


The Table of Contents of this third issue:

Cacophony and Monotony are the Twin Principles of Modern Design. Whatever Happened to Harmony?

When I look at most buildings designed in the traditional manner - this would be most built before the Second World War - it strikes me that the goal of the architect in his design is beauty, and that he seeks visual harmony through an appropriate proportioning of the parts in their different magnitudes. Generally, these were deliberately chosen to conform to a mathematical pattern whcih was believed to correspond to the pattern of the beauty of the cosmos, and which in turn participates in the pattern of divine beauty.

In contrast, when I look at modern buildings built since roughly the Second World War, I discern just two simple guiding principles of architectural design. These are even spacing and random spacing. Neither, in my opinion, is a principle of beauty. The first, even spacing, generates visual monotony. The second, random spacing, generates visual cacophony.

Harmony, monotony, and cacophony are the good, the bad, and the ugly of architectural form.

The traditional design principle has its origins in the mathematics of the ancient Greeks, and in one form or another was used, unquestioned, as the standard mode of design in art and architecture in the West until the period around the end of the 19th century. At that point, artists, architects and musical composers began, quite deliberately, to reject the tradition, and with it all traditional forms. By the mid-20th century, it had not only been rejected but, with very few exceptions, all but forgotten.

Does this matter? I think so, because I think beauty matters. The test for each of us to decide if it matters is to consider the buildings we would prefer to see, live and work in.

Consider first this Georgian house built in 17th century England.

What we see here is a classic manifestation of visual harmony in which, like a musical chord which is comprised of three different notes, each story has a different magnitude, and the combination is, to my eye at least, pleasing. That certainly was the intention of the architect in designing it this way.

Contrast this with the following more recent building, in which every story is evenly spaced.

I would characterize this using another musical analogy. It is a visual manifestation of a string quartet in which four identical violins play nothing but the continuous sounding of one note. However, clean and pure that note might be, however perfectly rendered, it quickly gets dull to listen to. It is, quite literally, monotonous.

The building below is built on the same design principle but on a grander scale, so that the result is the visual equivalent of a vast Mahler-sized orchestra, but once again, consisting of only one instrument, say 100 violins, all playing the same note. It doesn’t matter how many times you replicate that note, it is still monotonous. If that monotone is blasted at us through a megaphone, which is the visual equivalent of what is happening here, it gets worse, because we cannot escape it, and it obliterates all else around it that might be beautiful. In this case, it becomes offensive.

Here’s another example displaying a different design principle. Look at this building below.

First of all, can you guess what its purpose is?

Believe it or not, it’s a church. This random design is directed by uninformed intuition, the visual equivalent of cacophony. It is like the effect you would get if you had an orchestra comprised of many different instruments with each musician just playing notes randomly, and completely without any regard for what the others are playing. Here’s another church in the same vein.

Does this look like a building made to house the worship of God expressed through the beauty of chant and polyphony? The piece of music that best corresponds to this design that I can think of is Stockhausen’s absurd Helicopter String Quartet.

The traditional mathematics of beauty, in contrast, is an authentic analysis of the common human perception of the world around us, and is richer and more varied as a result. Furthermore, it is the basis upon which a Christian architecture is built. The mathematics of harmony and proportion came from classical sources, but was developed and enriched, just as instrumental music itself developed in the context of a Christian culture.

The more that we try to be different, as a deliberate statement of originality, the more, it seems that everything looks the same. The ugliness of so much modern architecture, and art and music for that matter, confirms for me the truth of the principle that there is no order outside God’s order, only disorder.

For those who want to know more about the mathematics of beauty, you can read my book, The Way of Beauty or for an even more detailed account, take the online class offered at www.Pontifex.University’s Master of Sacred Arts program called The Mathematics of Beauty.