The Christian Environmentalism that the Media Choose to Ignore

We Need More People in World, Not Fewer...
And the Liturgy to Transform Them

We need more people in the world, not fewer, if we are to solve the world’s problems. And we need more gardeners - I am serious here. For the true gardener is the man transformed in Christ who works in the world to raise it up to what it is meant to be.

It is common nowadays for people to think of man as an unnatural animal whose work necessarily destroys the environment. Much of the back to the land movement, I always feel, has a romantic vision of the past, and assumes that only a man who lives as he did before industrialization can live in harmony with nature. This pessimistic view of modern man could be seen in various influential figures going back to to Rousseau in 18th-century France, a man who hated industrialization and thought that all modern society corrupted ideal man. The ideal for Rousseau was the noble savage who, unlike modern man, could be conceived of as an intrinsic part of nature, living with it as the animals do, rather than in opposition to it.

This may all sound fairly innocuous stuff - a high regard for the environment is good thing, surely? But in fact it is a modern form of neo-paganism, which removes man from his a place as the highest part of creation to something separate from it, and lower than it. This false elevation of the rest of creation to something greater than man in the hierarchy of being has serious, deadly consequences. And I do mean deadly.

Man is not only part of nature, he is absolutely necessary to it - the eco-system needs the interaction of man in order to be complete. Through God’s grace human activity is the answer to all the environmental problems we have, not the cause. It is possible to have cities, heavy industry, mass production, and forms of capitalism that are creative expressions of the God’s plan for the world, and which add to the beauty and the stability of nature. However, we do need a transformation of the culture in order to see a greater realization of this. The formation, which I believe will lead to such an evangelization of the culture, is derived from a liturgically centered piety and is described in the book the Way of Beauty.

For me, the flower garden is the model of natural beauty in so many ways. First, it symbolizes the true end of the natural world, in which its beauty can only be realised through the inspired work of man. It symbolizes what Eden was to become. It is worth noting that Adam was the first gardener and Christ, the new Adam, prayed in the garden during the passion, was buried and resurrected in the garden, and after the resurrection was mistaken by Mary Magdalene for the gardener.

Here is a quote from St Augustine from the Office of Readings on the Feast of St Lawrence, August 10th:

“The garden of the Lord, brethren, includes – yes, it truly includes – not only the roses of martyrs, but also the lilies of virgins, and the ivy of married people, and the violets of widows. There is absolutely no kind of human beings, my dearly beloved, who need to despair of their vocation; Christ suffered for all. It was very truly written about him: who wishes all men to be saved, and to come to the acknowledgement of the truth.”

This may seem a rather innocent little quote about flowers and the things of religion - martyrs and virgins and so on, but in fact it reveals so much about the difference in attitudes between one of the Faith, and the modern world. Here’s how: we see Rousseau’s worldview today in many of the green movements that assume that any influence that man has on the eco-system is bad, because man himself is an unnatural entrant into it, not a part of it.

Millions of people have been killed as a result of a simple philosophical error. If we believe that civilized man’s effect on the environment is necessarily destructive, then the only method of an effective damage limitation is to limit the number of people in the world. The most effective way to do this is to control the population, and, because they do not wish to dispense of the pleasure of sex, the solutions offered are contraception and abortion.

The Christian understanding of man and his interaction with the natural world is very different. The first point to make is that both are imperfect. We are fallen and we live in a fallen world. Man is part of nature, and it is certainly true that his activity can be destructive on the environment (just as he can commit the gravest crimes against his fellows). However, through God’s grace and the proper exercise of free will, he can choose to behave differently. He can work to perfect nature. He has the privilege of participating in the work of God that will eventually lead to the perfection of all things in Christ. Then all man does is in harmony with nature, and with the common good. This is the via pulchritudinis, the Way of Beauty.

There are so many signs in modern culture that reveal this flawed perception of the place of man in relation to his fellows. The changing attitude to the garden is one of these. Even in something that seems so far removed from the issue of abortion, we can see a change which has at its root, in my opinion, the same flaw.

What is the model of natural beauty? For the modern green, neo-pagan it is the wilderness. National parks in the US seek to preserve nature in a way that they perceive as unaffected by man (although this is an impossibility, even the most remote national park is managed wilderness!) I do not say that is a bad thing that some part of nature is preserved, or that the wilderness is not beautiful. Rather, the point is that it is not the pinnacle of nature, and it is not the standard of natural beauty. When man works harmoniously with the environment, then he makes something more beautiful. Beautifully and harmoniously farmed land takes the breath away - as we might see in the countryside of France, Spain, England and Italy, for example, places of which I am familiar. This the sort of landscape in which Wordsworth saw his host of wild golden daffodils.

Higher still is the garden that is cultivated for beauty alone. A garden is a symbol of the Church. Each part, each plant is in harmony with every other, just as every person is unique and has his place in God’s plan, as St Augustine points out in the quote given above. Gardens will have their place in the New Jerusalem. We know this because the description of the City of God in the Book of Revelation contains gardens.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Science Studies the Pattern of the Past, Beauty is the Pattern of the Future. Science Needs Help!

Beauty speaks of our purpose, and hence points to the future, while science speaks of the past. Each is an analysis that studies the pattern of the cosmos, but does so in different ways. They are distinct, complementary descriptions of reality.

Beauty is teleological

When we behold something that is beautiful, it bears the mark of what we yearn for, but it is not itself what we yearn for, or not fully. It is like when we smell food cooking in the kitchen. We want to go in and ask, “What’s cooking?” The aroma tells us of the good food that is on the stove, but it doesn’t matter how deeply we inhale, we will not be satiated; only the food itself can satisfy the hunger. Similarly, the beauty of the cosmos and of the culture of man (if inspired by God) is a participation in the beauty of God, but neither is God. Perceptible beauty, therefore, draws us to itself and then beyond to God. We are always partially dissatisfied, left wanting more. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI
talks of the way that beauty touches us and increases our desire for God as a benign wound. For example, in his general audience of August 31, 2011, in reference to the power of sacred art to inspire prayer, he asked that “we may pause to contemplate the ray of beauty that strikes us to the quick, that almost ‘wounds’ us, and that invites us to rise toward God.”

The rose window of the north façade of Rheims Cathedral. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Tango7174; GNU Free Documentation License version 1.2)

One of the qualities of beauty described by St Thomas Aquinas is integritas. This is the aspect by which it communicates the purpose of what is beheld, and if that purpose is good, the object will be beautiful. The purpose derives its goodness from the part it plays in God’s grand plan for the redemption of all things, and so it speaks therefore not only of its own purpose, but of God and by our relation to both, of the meaning of our lives in the deepest sense.

God made all of us to respond to beauty in this way. It stimulates our desire for our personal telos - our ultimate end - and directs us to it, which is the Final Cause, God. If we reject or are blind to its message, then all is meaningless. This is the desolation of ugliness, which distorts or hides true meaning. We love beauty precisely for this reason - because it gives an authentic color and purpose to our lives, which would otherwise be gray and empty, and connects us harmoniously with the environment in which we live.

Furthermore, we cannot see a purpose to an object unless we recognize that what we are looking at is an entity - something that is complete in itself. This might be an artifact, for example, that corresponds to the organizing principle that was an idea of the artist who created it; or a “substance” with an organizing principle, a form, which is within it, such as the soul. These principles of organization are “formal causes” that arrange the parts in relation to each other in such a way that the whole is in harmony with its purpose. This is another quality of beauty described by St Thomas, and which he called due proportion. The object has due proportion when all its parts are in right relation with each other, so that the whole can serve its purpose well.

The mathematics of beauty is the study of the patterns that connect all beautiful things, which we might call the science of harmony and due proportion. It begins with beautiful entities, identified by human consensus, then analyses the common patterns to characterize what we are responding to. For example, nearly everyone recognizes the beauty of the cosmos, and we can consider what is it about the cosmos that we are all responding to. We might read of this in the works of Plato, Aristotle or Boethius, or in the manuals of architects such as Vitruvius, Alberti and Palladio. These studies are as relevant today as they were when they were written. We might describe the ratio 2:1 as the formal cause of the octave for example. It is manifested in two pipes of equal diameter that produce sounds an octave apart, with one twice the length of the other. The purpose of creating such a thing is harmonious sound. We might then incorporate this ratio into the proportions of a beautiful building in such a way that it fulfills its purpose well. The proximate end of both the organ and the building is good when it is in harmony with the ultimate end of all things, God, the Final Cause. As J.S. Bach once said, “The final aim and reason of all music is nothing other than the glorification of God and the refreshment of the spirit.”

Science needs help

Natural philosophy, what we today call “science”, focuses on material and efficient causes. It is limited, therefore to the study of the material world, and so can never prove the existence of God! As such, it analyses the present so as to discern what past events, or what chain of events occurring simultaneously in the present, created the data observed. Then it attempts to predict the future by extrapolating from the pattern of the past. As such, it is a different sort of analysis from the mathematics of beauty, but good and useful nevertheless. It is very good at predicting what happens in simple systems in the near future. From this man has received great benefits, as demonstrated by advances in technology and medicine. But it is limited in its ability to predict the future in complex systems and in the long term.

Its limitations lie precisely in the fact that as a study of the pattern of past and present events, it ignores other causes for change which can also have an impact on the future. So the more complex the system and the further into the future it tries to look, the greater the chance of error because it is more likely that those other forces for change - final and formal causes - will have an impact.

Natural science as a method of inquiry is blind to the possibilities, for example, of human creativity, inspiration, and the way in which each of us uses our naturally endowed freedom.

Natural science is a weak method of inquiry, therefore, in any field in which free will might have a part to play. Free will is a force for change that does not precisely conform to the pattern of physical laws. Therefore, it encounters difficulties in the social sciences and economics, for example, if they are treated purely as natural sciences.

Scientific socialism, otherwise known as Marxism, claims to predict the future based upon a scientific analysis of history, but it has failed spectacularly to do so. The response of socialists and Marxists to the non-appearance of the predicted workers’ Utopia on earth is to give history a push and to try to make it happen. Some have done this by forcing people at gunpoint to do what the enlightened Marxist thinks they ought to do, hastening resolution by revolution. Others do so through the attempt to stimulate a tension between opposites - a Hegelian dialectic - from which they believe the resolution will emerge. In today’s world, we see this engineered social conflict in the language of oppressor and oppressed, which is played out in the grievance politics of race, gender, and sexual orientation. Despite all this effort, nowhere have we seen anything that even approaches the happy resolution they predict, yet they press on with their efforts regardless.

This is not the only field of endeavor in which experts predict with great confidence what will happen and seem to fail spectacularly, without, apparently any dent in their confidence to continue to do so, or for the regard with which much of society seems to hold them. Time after time, we see predictions relating to politics, economics, cultural changes fail to materialize, because experts in these fields of the study of human society ignore the true basis of human decision making. This applies to the numerous Malthusian predictions of doom for the human race which, it is claimed, have a scientific basis.

One wonders if the methods of the mathematics of beauty, which begin with human perception, might complement natural science here and offer help. It has occurred to me, for example, that the Austrian economist Frederick von Hayak’s insight of the observation of “spontaneous order” in the pattern of human activity is an intuitive lateral jump on his part, which takes him away from the approach of natural science to one that is similar to that of the science of harmony and proportion. He reached his conclusions by recognizing free will as a force for change. His is a more synthetic, as opposed to analytical, style of thinking, which looks at the pattern of the whole, and as such is more in line with the approach of the ancients.

Furthermore, as the analyses of natural scientists dig ever deeper down into the chain of events that cause motion, at some point they are going to hit the First Cause that cranks the engine of the universe, and which will, in all likelihood, fail to conform to the order which describes efficient causes. One wonders if we didn’t hit this point early in the 20th century with quantum mechanics, which presents natural scientists with a philosophical conundrum which it has still not, to my knowledge, really settled satisfactorily. The difficulties are described in the book published in 2005, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down by Robert B. Laughlin, a Stamford professor and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics. In this book, he describes how the scientific method seems to be inadequate to account for what is observed, and, although as a scientist he doesn’t say it directly, in effect argues for a new approach that requires philosophical insight normally lacking in natural scientists.

Science, in effect, needs its own Hayak, someone who is capable of making that intuitive philosophical leap that recognizes the different order that arises from different sorts of causes. As Christians, we can see that all change begins and ends with God, and any intellectual field that ignores this truth will hit problems eventually.

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.

New Catholic University Aims to Renew Culture of Beauty

The following press release comes to us from Pontifex University, and is reproduced from their website.

Pontifex University offers a unique approach to higher Catholic education by forming students in the way of beauty so they might renew traditional Catholic culture. Expert faculty including highly respected Catholic artists teach courses online. Regional workshops are planned around the US, Italy and the Holy Land, which include special access to the Vatican Museums and restoration workshops, as well as an optional graduation Mass in the Vatican.

The Masters of Sacred Arts (MSA) degree is a groundbreaking combination of theory and practice. In addition to the study of theology, philosophy, architecture, film, music and art, students have mentored hands-on studio work in drawing, iconography, painting and sculpture. This two-year program is perfect for artists, architects, priests, seminarians, religious, educators, laity, patrons of the arts and anyone looking to create beauty as a sign of hope in today’s world.

Pontifex programs are established on the premise that in all genuine Catholic education, the ultimate Educator is God Himself. As Pius XI stated, the aim of a Christian education is “to form the supernatural man who thinks, judges and acts constantly and consistently in accordance with right reason illumined by the supernatural light.” The goal of Pontifex is to guide students along the path, the Way of Beauty, which leads to the supernatural transformation in Christ, so equipping one to serve Him.

The MSA program was designed by Provost David Clayton, previously Artist-in-Residence at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, whose book The Way of Beauty, published by Angelico Press in 2015, contains the principles utilized by Pontifex University. “The launching of the MSA program at Pontifex is the culmination of 20 years’ research,” Clayton said. “It all began when, as a recent convert, I decided to become an artist and couldn’t find anywhere to give me the training I wanted. I had to work it all out for myself. I am thrilled now to see this being offered to the next generation which, who knows, might contain a latter day Van Eyck or Velaquez!”

The MSA offers the same formation that enabled the great Catholic artists of the past to create works of radiant beauty that are at once noble, elevating and accessible to the many, drawing all to God. Pontifex prepares students to pass the test laid down for artists by Pope Benedict XVI: “It is precisely the test of true creativity that the artist steps out of the esoteric circle and knows how to form his or her intuition in such a way that the others—the many—may perceive what the artist has perceived.”

Pontifex University’s MSA is the new catalyst that shows how to bring these elements together in harmony with one’s personal vocation, whatever it may be, for the glory of God and joy of mankind.

About Pontifex University

Pontifex University is an authentic Roman Catholic institution formed in 2015 and overseen by a self perpetuating Board of Trustees that governs the Solidarity Association of the Christian Faithful, a public juridical body established by decree.

St Matthew the Evangelist from the Lindisfarne Gospels

To mark the feast of St Matthew, here is the illumination from the 8th century British manuscript (the original is in the British Library). 

There are profound lessons here for those who wish to pray, and for those who wish to paint...or both. This simple painting, which is over 1200 years old and was created by an obscure monk working on a bleak island of the northeast coast of England in the North Sea, can tell us so much. It reveals truths about St Matthew, and from its style we can discern things about the whole history of Christian art. These are lessons that budding artists can apply today, even if we want to paint in completely different styles like the baroque.

To be able to see these things in the painting we will look first at the historical context: this little painting even tells us about the history of Britain! Art historians - (and the font of all knowledge, Wikipedia, of course!) - will describe the style of this art as “insular” or “hiberno-saxon”. This refers to the Celtic style of art and literature of the Christians who remained in the British Isles and Ireland after the retreat of the Romans. It is viewed as “insular” in two ways - first more literally, as it belongs to the islands of Britain and Ireland; and secondly, because it is often viewed as a style that is distinct from others of this period. There is a third reason particular to this gospel, in that Lindisfarne, the site of an abbey, is an remote island off the coast of Northumberland in northeast England. The artist of this painting was a monk called Eadfrith, who later became the abbot of Lindisfarne.

The British islanders who remained after the retreat of Roman troops in the 5th century were culturally Roman, and wrote in Latin. Over the following centuries, they were gradually overwhelmed by the incursions of German and Nordic tribes. But even in the 8th century, there were pockets of Latin culture left, and most of the Lindisfarne Gospel is written in Latin. On this page “Mattheus” is in Latin, and he is referred to as a saint with the Greek word “Hagios.” Matthew is depicted writing his gospel with the figure of the winged man, his traditional symbol, standing on his shoulder (imago hominis - the image of a man). This is one of the four faces of the cherub described by Ezekiel in his vision at the beginning of his book. Over time, Germanic and Viking culture dominated more and more, and by the 9th century Latin was not so widely spoken; and so on other pages the original Latin gospel text is translated into the vernacular in red ink.

The curtains are present to indicate that the person is inside, and are drawn back to reveal the scene to the observer. Some commentaries refer to this as a symbolic unveiling by which the truth is revealed. I have to be honest and say I do not know who the figure peeping out from behind the curtain is. Can anyone help me here?

The style of the Lindisfarne Gospels is certainly distinctive. While retaining its unique look, it still conforms largely to the iconographic prototype, which governed Christian art, East and West, from about the 5th century through to the 13th century. This is a Western variant, so while it doesn’t look like a Russian icon, it still conforms in many ways to the same prototype, with the characteristic flatness and lack of perspective that one expects in icons, revealing the heavenly dimension which is outside space. In order to emphasize this, the bench upon which Matthew is sitting is in inverse perspective. He has his feet on a pedestal, indicating that he is a sacred person.

There is one little anomaly, however. A feature that pulls it away from strict conformity to the icon is the fact that the symbolic winged man is in profile. In icons, faces are generally in three-quarter profile or full face (like the other two figures), indicating a Saint who is happy to reveal his person to the viewer, because in his purified state he has nothing to hide. Most images from this period conformed fully to the iconographic prototype, as may be seen here with the four evangelists in the Book of Kells, produced about 100 years later considered to be of the same period and style. We can see St Matthew portrayed in three quarter profile, the standard for human forms. I don't know why Eadfrith departed from this in his version. It might be a mistake or even an act of defiance, or perhaps a little bit of ignorance.

There is another aspect to this, which relates the question of how we know what an icon is. What is it that makes something an icon, rather part of the gothic tradition? Anyone who has done an icon painting class or read a book about icons is aware that there are stylistic principles which govern what they do. What many do not know is that the rules that they are being given are a modern construct, written and popularized for the most part in the 20th century. I have researched the matter, and asked many people about it, and I am not aware of any writings prior to the recent period that represent a codification of the stylistic elements that make in icon an icon, rather than, say, a piece of gothic art. There are no writings by Church Fathers, for example. The rules that you come across in the books were devised by a group of Russian ex-patriots in Paris; especially influential were two men called Ouspensky and Lossky. They looked at the images that they judged to be good and worthy of veneration, and then devised a set of rules that seem to apply to them to aid people to create art in a similar style in the future. To my knowledge, no such code was in existence in writing when Eadfrith was active. We do not know the degree to which the style, which seems to have been preserved by force of tradition, was directly linked to the theology of style in the way that it is presented today. Perhaps, in fact, there was more leeway than we imagine and Eadfrith was just making what would have seemed a legitimate artistic decision.

Make no mistake, people such as Ouspensky and Lossky did a great job, in my opinion. They provided a set of guidelines by which something that was in the 19th century a wayward tradition in Russian and Greece was reestablished into a strong and clearly defined form, so that icon painters today can be every bit as good as the top icon painters of the past.

These Russians were not without their own agenda in setting this down, however. They were Eastern Orthodox, and deliberately set down the rules so as to reflect their belief that the Western forms of art were inferior (“degenerate“ ” is the term I have heard used to refer to the gothic and the baroque.) Catholics should be aware of this. The idea that all sacred art has to look like an icon is, from the point of view of the Catholic Church, flat out wrong. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop many Catholics from unquestioningly accepting it, and repeating the anti-Catholic rhetoric that they have heard in their icon painting class. Contemporary Orthodox commentators are motivated to make Western forms that were created prior to the schism between East and Western Church, such as this example of insular art, fit in with the iconographic prototype, because it supports an argument that Christian culture was unified before the schism, and then fragmented afterwards. Then, the argument runs, we can see that the Eastern Churches remain faithful to the original forms of Christianity, while it is the Roman Church that has veered away.

We don’t have space here to give the full theology of the image that governs the Western traditions in art, but we can give a general picture of what is legitimate for the liturgy and what is not, I take my lead from Pope Benedict XVI, who wrote in The Spirit of the Liturgy that the icon is appropriate for the liturgy, (in this he agrees with the Orthodox), but for the Roman Rite, he says, the gothic and the baroque styles are appropriate too. So, you can continue to enjoy and worship with paintings in the style of people such as Duccio and George De La Tours. I would say that the one thing where the Eastern Church does lead the West is in the re-establishment of these traditions. We are 60 years behind in propagating a theology of the uniquely Western styles, in the way that the East has done for icons. My book, the Way of Beauty, was an attempt to create a the theory of the gothic and the baroque traditions analogous to what Lossky and Ouspensky did for the iconographic tradition.

Below, classic baroque - St Matthew and the Angel by Guido Reni of the 17th century - with the angel...legitimately... in profile; and the same evangelist by Duccio

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My book the Way of Beauty is available from Angelico Press and Amazon.

Business, Beauty and Liturgy

A theology of work and the entrepreneur 

In his book The Wellspring of Worship, Jean Corbon (who also wrote the section on prayer in the Catechism) wrote the following: “Work and culture are the place where men and the world meet in the glory of God. This encounter fails or is obscured to the degree that men ‘lack God's glory’ (Rom. 3, 23)... If the experience is to be filled with glory, men must first become once again the dwelling places of this glory and be clothed in it; that is why, existentially, everything begins with the liturgy of the heart and the divinisation of the human person.” Elsewhere he states that an absence of communion through Eucharistic liturgy “that is at the root of injustices in the workplace, with its alienating structures and disorders in the economy.”(pp. 225, 229)

How can we change society and the culture into one that is beautiful, is just and is built on true community? I say, following on from Corbon, that if we wish to change society, we must look to ourselves first, so that we become the people who are transformed in Christ - transfigured - and show Him to others by our actions and interactions. Society is a network of personal interactions, and we change society, therefore, by changing the way we interact with others. There is no aspect of human life to which this does not apply.

Only God’s grace can do this for us, and it is by prayer, or more precisely, by worship of God that we encounter Christ in such a way that it can happen. When we can be one of those people, then people will be drawn to the Church through us and join us. To the degree that anyone is participating in the divine nature and showing people the transfigured Christ in their daily lives, he is someone who, by grace, will relate to others in properly ordered love. This is what attracts people to the Faith. This will be evident in the workplace as much as anywhere else. All economic interactions ought to be personal and loving as much as any other in a good society. In the sphere of economics this is how the principle of superabundance is invoked that creates prosperity for society. This principle of superabundance is the great untold secret for the creation for wealth; if it isn’t actually the pearl of great price, it will certainly give you means to buy it!

None of us should ignore this, for we are all involved in economic interactions of some sort, and we all need to flourish and make sufficient wealth to live on. However, some people have a particular calling to be entrepreneurs. They have a special grace, an ability to make money beyond their personal needs, and in a way that encourages human flourishing at all levels. When they do this, they are participating in the creative work of God and contributing to the culture by creating something of beauty. However, for that calling to be realized, they need also to be aware not only of how to make money in a way that is in accord with the common good, but also of the end to which that money should be directed responsibly. They must be good stewards. It is the nature of charisms that unless they are directed in love, they evaporate, which is to say, they cannot be misused. So while it is possible for someone to make money selfishly, of course, it also possible for people who do not have this particular calling to develop the skill of entrepreneurship and be driven by good motives. The person who has this charism, however, and special calling, will generate wealth almost effortlessly (compared to others) and in great abundance when he does so in accordance with the principle of love.

Benedict XVI describes this ideal for personal interactions in economic activity in his encyclical, Caritas in veritate. It is a network of such personal interactions that in aggregate form a free society, and the free economy described by John Paul II in Centesimus annus.

Pope Benedict describes how Christians are transformed in Christ in this life by degrees and by grace - transfigured and participating in the divine nature - through a personal encounter with God in the Eucharist. To the degree that human relationships are driven by concern for the other person, they are in accordance with the Trinitarian dynamic of love, which is the model for the loving component of personal relationships. When this Love is present, it is always superabundant. Love is superabundant - fruitful without measure - because of the generosity of God who can give beyond all limitations and creates out of nothing. It is by this principle that wealth is generated in properly ordered economic transactions.

Though we may not think of it as such, the ordinary exchange of goods for money that we are daily engaged in does not redistribute wealth, it creates wealth. By this simple exchange both parties have something they value more than before, and so wealth has been created (otherwise they would not both choose to make the exchange). However, a caveat is necessary here. This is true provided that there is personal freedom, understood not simply as lack of constraint, but also full knowledge of the practicable best.

One of the beauties of the participating in the market in a free economy is that if I am dealing with someone in such a transaction who is genuinely free to choose whether or not he trades with me, then even if I am driven by selfish ends, I am forced to consider his needs and what is good from his point of view. If I don’t, chances are that he will choose not to trade with me because he is free not to do so. So, provided that freedom is present, even the selfish like me are forced to some degree at least into loving action. Even in this minimal form of love there is superabundance. In practice, rarely is someone wholly driven by selfish interests, just as it is rare that is someone wholly loving in action and thought. Superabundance is maximized to the degree that both parties are genuinely interested in the well being of the other as they engage in the transaction. This is when all the aspects for which a price cannot be paid - at a simple level a genuine care and attention, for example are given freely too.

To the degree that the loving component grows, people relate to each other in such a way that the other flourishes. When the conditions exist that allow for this to happen, people will naturally seek out others who interact in this way, and the complexion of the economy gradually changes. Economic prosperity is maximized to the extent that the activity that it creates it is in harmony with a flourishing of the society of human persons. When people are transformed in Christ, then they are more naturally inclined to consider the other in what they do, going beyond the simple contractual elements of trade, and create an economy that is rooted in a love which goes beyond the minimum requirement of justice.

One might refer to this as a covenant economy, one that is ordered to mutual giving, rather than one that is purely contractual and relies on the alignment of self-interest alone. St John Paul II pointed out in Centesimus annus that the market is the most efficient and best way to distribute goods for which a price can be paid. He then stated that this also defines the limitations of the market; it cannot distribute those things for which a price cannot be paid which are also vital in life and the flourishing of the human person. That is why he said that this market will be in the context of what he called a “free economy”. Pope Benedict in Caritas in Veritate connects the two much more directly in each economic transaction, and says that if those aspects for which money is not paid are not also present therein, (he calls this additional element one of gratuitousness), then there is no superabundance. In fact, he goes on to say that gratuitousness must be present if wealth is to be created.

When freedom is lacking, the result is not the superabundant creation of wealth, but an enforced redistribution of wealth that favors one party more than the other inequitably. The party that gains is not just taking advantage of the other person in the exchange, but is parasitical upon society as a whole, drawing from it, rather than contributing to it; one only needs to look at a neighborhood in which drug dealing is rife to see such effects. Similarly, government taxation directed towards paying for activities that go beyond the natural role of government (which should be limited to the regulating for and protecting personal freedom), are also acts against the common good that go against freedom, and are contrary to what a government’s role should be. They will have the same stultifying effects on society as whole that we see, for example, in Venezuela today, and we saw in the Eastern bloc countries of the past so markedly.

Pope Benedict describes in many places in his writings how the personal transformation, by which a person is capable of and inclined to interact lovingly with his neighbors, will occur. Perhaps one of the most simply and concisely present examples is his little paper on the New Evangelization. We must first look at ourselves; we must learn to pray. It is through prayer, and, to be precise, a liturgically centered piety, that we are transformed.

Not all prosperous societies are Catholic societies (whatever we mean by that), and not all Catholic societies are prosperous. But it is to the degree that any earthly city and its people participate in those ideals of the City of God, Catholic or not, that it is prosperous and stable. It is the beauty of the culture, and especially the culture of Faith, that will inspire Christians to pray well, and non-believers to pray at all. Beauty engenders creativity, inspires us to love, and so to participate in the superabundant love in anything we do, including trade. This is why beauty, the free economy and the liturgy are inseparable.

People today yearn for community and for a beautiful culture that they feel is absent from their lives. This is not a new thing; it is what people have yearned for since there were people around to yearn for anything in life. The answer lies in each of us looking to ourselves. We must retreat to the wilderness, symbolically, in prayer, the place where Christ engaged with the devil. Then transformed, we emerge and engage with our fellow man. We do not need to flee further at this point. We engage wherever we happen to be, wherever there are people. In doing so we will create the culture and the community we yearn for around us, where we are, right here and right now. If this is not happening, then we look afresh at ourselves. While this means that work becomes that of the artisan, like St Joseph, which we tend to romanticize today, we do not need to think that this is a process of turning back the clock. Rather, it is one of adding to the workplaces that we are already in, the factory, shop, office, building site and so on, and raising it up to a place of beauty and love.

Even in these workplaces, which are often seen as places that are opposed to Christian values, we can be that person, clothed in glory, who transforms those around them and transform the work culture. This is the message of the Church and of the New Evangelization. It begins with us being transformed in the liturgy, and the hope is that after we engage with them we lead others back to the liturgy. It will be by the grace, beauty and love that others see in our work that they will let us do so.

A word on the pictures: the first is Titian’s Transfiguration; the second, by the 20th-century Italian artist Pietro Annigoni is St Joseph the Worker with Our Lord. The other three photographs are of a car production line, a NYC trading floor, and a clothes factory in India. It is easy in some ways to look back on the work of St Joseph as a carpenter and see this as participating in the Transfiguration, and this is reflected brilliantly by Annigoni. We tend to romanticize the work of the artisan nowadays, and assume that somehow this work is intrinsically different from the work most people do today. This is why, supposedly, the factory worker is more alienated today than the agricultural worker of the 16th century. I am not persuaded of this. I think it depends as much on the people involved as the nature of the work. I suggest that we should not seek to eliminate or escape from the modern workplace, but work for its transformation with our participation in the liturgy at the heart of what we do. Then, by our engagement with them, these places too can be in harmony with the life of the world to come. I hope that when we look back on the work of the sacred artist if the 21st century, it will portray Saints on the trading floor with as much empathy as the man tilling the land; or the seamstress on the shop floor with the same light of grace as Our Lady sewing the curtains for the Temple.

— ♦—

The book, the Way of Beauty is a manual for a formation in beauty that explains how the whole culture is a reflection of divine love, how we can become agents of that change as well as educators who can form offer that formation to others. It is available from Angelico Press and Amazon.

—JAY W. RICHARDS, Editor of the Stream and Lecturer at the Business School fo the Catholic University of America said about it: “In The Way of Beauty, David Clayton offers us a mini-liberal arts education. The book is a counter-offensive against a culture that so often seems to have capitulated to a ‘will to ugliness.’ He shows us the power in beauty not just where we might expect it — in the visual arts and music — but in domains as diverse as math, theology, morality, physics, astronomy, cosmology, and liturgy. But more than that, his study of beauty makes clear the connection between liturgy, culture, and evangelization, and offers a way to reinvigorate our commitment to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the twenty-first century. I am grateful for this book and hope many will take its lessons to heart.”

Book Review: David Clayton's The Way of Beauty: Liturgy, Education, and Inspiration for Family, School, and College

Readers of NLM are no strangers to the fine work of David Clayton, as painter and iconographer, teacher and writer, and generally a whirlwind of interesting ideas on all things aesthetic. Over the years he has contributed some of my favorite articles here at NLM, be they on mathematical proportions in architecture and music, on what makes a work of art sacred rather than merely religious, on the many links between the liturgy and the fine arts, on the conditions for a rebirth of ecclesiastical art in our times, on the profound connection between education and liturgy (something that is, sad to say, understood by few), and on comparisons between different stylistic periods in art and how these differences affect the representation and perception. Just the other day he was writing about gardens -- appropriately for a man who seems, garden-like, to produce an abundance of intellectual flowers and fruits.

Clayton's remarkable compendium, The Way of Beauty: Liturgy, Education, and Inspiration for Family, School, and College, was published this summer by Angelico Press. The book and its subtitle tell you a great deal: this book indeed covers "the way of beauty" in so many rich ways, tying together not only the several fine arts themselves (in detailed assessments of how works of art actually function educationally and liturgically), but also the larger cultural context in which art is always situated and which it powerfully shapes in turn, the optimal environment for the arts to be practiced and their works contemplated, and the philosophical and theological roots of artistic endeavor as found across cultures and civilizations. The book is an extended meditation on the meaning of beauty, which has its exemplar in God, and how this beauty is expressed among us in number, weight, and measure, in form and matter, in signs and symbols, in complementary styles.

Although ambitious and detailed, the book is easy to read. It falls into distinct sections; indeed, one might say that it is four slim books published in one volume. Part One (pp. 1-96), "The Connection Between Liturgy, the Culture, and Education," is a set of variations on the theme, made popular by Dawson, of the link between cult, culture, and cultivation. While I think everyone should read the book, it's perfectly obvious to me that anyone involved in Catholic education, at any level, should make a point of studying this part, which is not merely speculative but chock full of practical suggestions for improving school environments and curricula.

Part Two (pp. 97-172) pursues the argument into universal principles that govern the arts and tie them into the universe, the human heart, and the Catholic faith. I have often thought that people need to study this kind of treatise in order to see examples of natural law at work in areas other than hot-button moral issues.

Part Three (pp. 173-232) is a remarkable mini-treatise on "The Forms of Figurative Christian Liturgical Art," rightly subtitled "A Guide for Artists and Those Establishing a Canon of Images for Study in an Education of Beauty." Clayton takes his point of departure from The Spirit of the Liturgy, where Joseph Ratzinger identifies the Byzantine, the Gothic, and the Baroque "at its best" as the three authentic styles or modes of sacred art. Clayton fleshes out this judgment of Ratzinger's by a careful examination of the qualities of sacred art and how they relate to theological anthropology and the Christian liturgy. This part contains a marvelous introduction to the theology of the icon, a discussion of how and why naturalism entered into sacred art, and "case studies" of icons ancient and modern as well as Gothic and Baroque works of art, where the author applies his principles to particulars. All of this part should be required reading for any Catholic artist or artisan.

Part Four (pp. 233-261) brings together a number of short pieces that fill out or illustrate points made in parts 1-3.

In the photos below, I have favored pages with artwork, to show the way Clayton brings his analysis to actual examples, rather than dwelling in the clouds among generalities. In the book the illustrations are in grayscale, but thoughtfully, Angelico Press has gathered onto one internet page all the color versions, here.

Looking over it as a whole, where I find Clayton's book most exciting is his compelling case for the integral place of the beautiful -- of fine arts and sacred art, and aesthetic education -- in the New Evangelization. Beauty is not an extra or an add-on, a luxury or an indulgence, but an essential and inherent dimension of truth itself (when it is really the truth!), an attribute of our Lord Jesus Christ and of His liturgy. If we abandon our pursuit of excellence and understanding in this domain, we stand to lose our faith, our our ability to transform the world for God's sake, and even our sanity. This, of course, is a drum I've been beating, too, for years and years, in the hopes that more and more people will wake up to the reality that ugliness, like ignorance, error, and sin, is a privation and a deprivation, with a peculiar de-evangelizing force, while beauty, like truth and goodness, converts, perfects, and elevates us to God. Moreover, without faith and the ordering it gives to our final destiny in God, art itself can become pernicious. Christianity is the art of salvation and the salvation of art.

I most highly recommend this book to all who are genuinely captivated by the new liturgical movement and all that it stands for. The way of beauty is, for us, absolutely essential, and Clayton has produced an exceptional guidebook to it.

The Christian Environmentalism that the Media Choose to Ignore

We Need More People in World, Not Fewer...
And the Liturgy to Transform Them

We need more people in the world, not fewer, if we are to solve the world’s problems. And we need more gardeners - I am serious here. For the true gardener is the man transformed in Christ who works in the world to raise it up to what it is meant to be.

It is common nowadays for people to think of man as an unnatural animal whose work necessarily destroys the environment. Much of the back to the land movement, I always feel, has a romantic vision of the past, and assumes that only a man who lives as he did before industrialization can live in harmony with nature. This pessimistic view of modern man could be seen in various influential figures going back to to Rousseau in 18th-century France, a man who hated industrialization and thought that all modern society corrupted ideal man. The ideal for Rousseau was the noble savage who, unlike modern man, could be conceived of as an intrinsic part of nature, living with it as the animals do, rather than in opposition to it.

This may all sound fairly innocuous stuff - a high regard for the environment is good thing, surely? But in fact it is a modern form of neo-paganism, which removes man from his a place as the highest part of creation to something separate from it, and lower than it. This false elevation of the rest of creation to something greater than man in the hierarchy of being has serious, deadly consequences. And I do mean deadly.

Man is not only part of nature, he is absolutely necessary to it - the eco-system needs the interaction of man in order to be complete. Through God’s grace human activity is the answer to all the environmental problems we have, not the cause. This is the part of Pope Francis’s message in his latest encyclical, a fact which so many eco-warriors who were enthusiastic about the encyclical seem not to have noticed...or to have ignored. It is possible to have cities, heavy industry, mass production, and forms of capitalism that are creative expressions of the God’s plan for the world, and which add to the beauty and the stability of nature. However, we do need a transformation of the culture in order to see a greater realization of this. The formation, which I believe will lead to such an evangelization of the culture, is derived from a liturgically centered piety and is described in the book the Way of Beauty.

For me, the flower garden is the model of natural beauty in so many ways. First, it symbolizes the true end of the natural world, in which its beauty can only be realised through the inspired work of man. It symbolizes what Eden was to become. It is worth noting that Adam was the first gardener and Christ, the new Adam, prayed in the garden during the passion, was buried and resurrected in the garden, and after the resurrection was mistaken by Mary Magdalene for the gardener.

Here is a quote from St Augustine from the Office of Readings on the Feast of St Lawrence, August 10th:

“The garden of the Lord, brethren, includes – yes, it truly includes – not only the roses of martyrs, but also the lilies of virgins, and the ivy of married people, and the violets of widows. There is absolutely no kind of human beings, my dearly beloved, who need to despair of their vocation; Christ suffered for all. It was very truly written about him: who wishes all men to be saved, and to come to the acknowledgement of the truth.”

This may seem a rather innocent little quote about flowers and the things of religion - martyrs and virgins and so on, but in fact it reveals so much about the difference in attitudes between one of the Faith, and the modern world. Here’s how: we see Rousseau’s worldview today in many of the green movements that assume that any influence that man has on the eco-system is bad, because man himself is an unnatural entrant into it, not a part of it. 

Millions of people have been killed as a result of a simple philosophical error. If we believe that civilized man’s effect on the environment is necessarily destructive, then the only method of an effective damage limitation is to limit the number of people in the world. The most effective way to do this is to control the population, and, because they do not wish to dispense of the pleasure of sex, the solutions offered are contraception and abortion.

The Christian understanding of man and his interaction with the natural world is very different. The first point to make is that both are imperfect. We are fallen and we live in a fallen world. Man is part of nature, and it is certainly true that his activity can be destructive on the environment (just as he can commit the gravest crimes against his fellows). However, through God’s grace and the proper exercise of free will, he can choose to behave differently. He can work to perfect nature. He has the privilege of participating in the work of God that will eventually lead to the perfection of all things in Christ. Then all man does is in harmony with nature, and with the common good. This is the via pulchritudinis, the Way of Beauty.

There are so many signs in modern culture that reveal this flawed perception of the place of man in relation to his fellows. The changing attitude to the garden is one of these. Even in something that seems so far removed from the issue of abortion, we can see a change which has at its root, in my opinion, the same flaw.

What is the model of natural beauty? For the modern green, neo-pagan it is the wilderness. National parks in the US seek to preserve nature in a way that they perceive as unaffected by man (although this is an impossibility, even the most remote national park is managed wilderness!) I do not say that is a bad thing that some part of nature is preserved, or that the wilderness is not beautiful. Rather, the point is that it is not the pinnacle of nature, and it is not the standard of natural beauty. When man works harmoniously with the environment, then he makes something more beautiful. Beautifully and harmoniously farmed land takes the breath away - as we might see in the countryside of France, Spain, England and Italy, for example, places of which I am familiar. This the sort of landscape in which Wordsworth saw his host of wild golden daffodils.

Higher still is the garden that is cultivated for beauty alone. A garden is a symbol of the Church. Each part, each plant is in harmony with every other, just as every person is unique and has his place in God’s plan, as St Augustine points out in the quote given above. Gardens will have their place in the New Jerusalem. We know this because the description of the City of God in the Book of Revelation contains gardens.

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Votive Mass of St Teilo Celebrated in the Extraordinary Form in the Historic Church of St Teilo in Wales

Here are some photos, courtesy of a regular NLM reader, Mr David Woolf, of a Votive Mass of St Teilo that was celebrated on February 7th in the Extraordinary Form in the Church of St Teilo, located at St Fagan’s National History Museum, Cardiff, Wales, UK.

David told me: ‘The Mass was hosted by the students of the Cardiff University Catholic Chaplaincy and was celebrated by their Chaplain, Fr Gareth Jones.

‘The Church of St Teilo is of particular historical interest. Having become redundant in 1970, it was moved, brick by brick, from its 12th century site at Llandeilo Taly-Bont, near Pontarddulais, and reconstructed at the St Fagan’s Museum. Prior to its removal, wall paintings, dating from the 15th century, were uncovered beneath the wall plaster. These were removed and preserved in the National Museum of Wales. When St Teilo’s Church was reconstructed it was decorated as it would have appeared in the 1530s.’

St Teilo’s feast day was two days later on February 9th. St Teilo is is a 6th century British saint, who studied under St Paulinus at Llanddeusant, in the Brecon Beacons and, as a monk, with St David at Mynyw in west Wales. He founded his own monastery at Llandeilo Fawr, again in the Brecon Beacons, the place where he probably died. A later tradition has St Teilo, accompanied by St David and St Padarn, make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He spent some years in Brittany. At Llandaff he is venerated as the founder of the see (which contains the capital of Wales, Cardiff).

Information on St Teilo from www.universalis.com
Photos: Dr David A Woolf

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David Clayton: How the Form of the Iconographic Tradition Relates to the Catholic Worldview

With today being the first Sunday of the Great Fast in the Byzantine liturgical calendar, and thereby also the commemoration of the "Triumph of Orthodoxy" wherein the Byzantine East commemorates "the restoration of icons, which had been banned for several decades, to their rightful liturgical use" (see Byzcath.org), this article by David Clayton on the subject of "How the form of the iconographic tradition relates to the Catholic worldview" is certainly pertinent -- though the timing was not specifically planned.

How the Form of the Iconographic Tradition Relates to the Catholic Worldview