St Catherine of Alexandria in the Counter-Reformation

The acts of St Catherine of Alexandria tell us that she was a noblewoman of immense learning in all the sciences, who at the age of eighteen went to the emperor Maximin Daia (305-312) to reprove him for his persecution of the Church, denouncing the worship of the false gods of the pagans. Unable to respond to her himself, Maximin had her imprisoned, and then brought a group of fifty philosophers to explain to her the folly of Christianity; all of these she converted to the Faith, for which they were put to death. Catherine was returned to prison, where she was visited by the empress and a captain of the emperor’s troops named Porphyry, both of whom were also converted, and soon after martyred. Catherine was then condemned to die by the famous spiked wheel which has long been known as her emblem, but which broke apart on touching her; like so many Saints whom Nature itself and the persecutors’ devices refused to harm, she was then beheaded. As the traditional Collect of her feast states, her body was carried by Angels to Mount Sinai, where first a church, and later the famous monastery were built in her honor.

An icon of the Presentation of Mary, with St Catherine on the far left. (Greek, 18th century). In the Byzantine Rite, the Entrance of the Virgin in the Temple is one of the twelve Great Feasts, most of which are kept with both a Forefeast and Afterfeast, broadly the equivalent of a vigil and octave in the traditional Roman Rite. Afterfeasts vary in length, and those of the Virgin’s Presentation and Nativity are the shortest, only four days, the final day being known as the Leave-taking; the Leavetaking of the Presentation therefore coincides with St Catherine’s feast day. (Photo from Wikimedia Commons by shakko.) 

She became one of the most popular Saints of the High Middle Ages beginning in the 11th century, when some of her relics were brought to the French city of Rouen. Innumerable churches and chapels were dedicated to her, she appears in an extraordinary number of paintings and statues, and her feast day was kept in many places as a holy day of obligation. She has long been honored as a Patron Saint of philosophers and theologians, orators and preachers, (and hence especially by the Dominicans, who kept her feast with an octave until the early 20th century,) but also of women in religious life, students of every sort, millers and wheelwrights. In France, her prestige was very much enhanced by the fact that she was one of the Saints who spoke to St Joan of Arc. She is honored in the Byzantine Rite with the title “Great Martyr”, and named in the preparation rite of the Divine Liturgy; in the Ambrosian Rite, her name was even added to the Canon of the Mass in the later 15th century.

It is painful to relate that no aspect of the life of St Catherine as given in her acts can be considered historically trustworthy. Just to give one of many possible examples, she is named as the “daughter of a king named Costus”, even though Egypt in the early fourth century was a province of the Roman Empire, and had had no king for over three-hundred years. There is no mention of her in the wealth of Egyptian Christian literature for several centuries after her death, or in the various accounts of pilgrims to the monastery on Mt Sinai, which was not originally named for her.

By the time the Roman Breviary was revised after the Council of Trent, scholars had long known that many of the well-known and loved stories of the Saints were not historically reliable. Thus we find several of the Virgin Martyrs who were very popular in the Middle Ages, such as Ss Barbara, Margaret of Antioch and Ss Ursula and Companions, reduced from full offices of nine readings in the Roman Breviary of 1529 to a mere commemoration in the Breviary of St Pius V. Even Ss Cecilia and Agatha, who are named in the Canon of the Mass, were originally kept at the second of three grades; only Ss Agnes, the Roman martyr par excellence among women, Lucy (a rather random choice), and Catherine of Alexandria were kept at the highest grade.

Virgo inter Virgines (The Virgin Mary among the other holy virgins) by the anonymous Netherlandish painter known as the Master of the St Lucy Legend, ca. 1490. The holy Virgins are Ss Apollonia, Ursula, Lucy, Dorothy, Catherine (receiving a ring from the baby Jesus; her red cloak is covered with her symbol, the wheel), Mary Magdalene, Barbara, Agnes, Margaret, Agatha and Cunera, patron of the Rhenen area near Utrecht, said be one of the 11,000 companions of St Ursula. (Click image to enlarge; click here for a complete explanation of the icongraphy.)

The Breviary of St Pius V, first published in 1568, was revised in the last decade of the same century, and a new edition published in 1602. Pope Clement VIII had entrusted the task of correcting the Saints’ lives to the great Cardinal Cesare Baronius, also the principal editor of the first Tridentine edition of the Martyrology. Among Baronius’ collaborators was St Robert Bellarmine, one of the most learned men of his age, who is supposed to have said in regard to St Catherine, “I wish I could believe that she existed.” In his History of the Roman Breviary, Mons. Pierre Batiffol notes (p. 216) that Baronius often refused, against St Robert’s advice, to alter some of the popular legends, despite the historical problems associated with them; and that he noted of St Catherine specifically, “Her history contains many things which are repugnant to the truth.” Nevertheless, her Office was left unaltered, and remained in the same form until the Breviary revision of 1960.

It was certainly a goal of the Tridentine reform of the Breviary to remove from the Church’s public prayer anything that might offer the Protestants a pretext for attack or ridicule. (Baronius was well aware of this problem, and also produced a massive history of the Church, covering the first 12 centuries, in response to Protestant controversialists.) The question therefore arises as to why a Saint whose life was subject to serious doubts, even on the part of the very revisers of the Breviary, was not merely included in it, but celebrated in one of its most prominent feasts.

In part, we may simply say that scholars must at times take their lesson from the devotion of the people, and accept what they may perhaps not understand. (It is interesting to note in this regard that St Catherine was abolished in the Novus Ordo, but restored to the general calendar by Pope St John Paul II.) But there are three aspects of the story of St Catherine that are particularly significant to the Counter-Reformation, which certainly contributed to the preservation of devotion to her.

The first is her role as the Patron Saint of philosophers, which comes, of course, from the story told above of her converting the fifty men sent to dissuade her of her Christian faith.

The second is her role as patron of women in religious life. This arises from the story that Maximin offered to take her on as a second wife or mistress, and even honor her as a goddess, if she would renounce the Faith. To this Catherine replied, “It is a crime even to think of such things. Christ has taken me to Himself as a bride; I have joined myself to Him as a bride in an indissoluble bond.” Other virgin martyrs like Ss Agnes and Agatha also speak of themselves in similar terms, but for whatever reason, it was seen as especially important in Catherine’s case. Therefore, she is very often represented, both before and after the Counter-Reformation, receiving a wedding ring from the infant Christ as He is held by His Mother, joined to him in a mystical marriage, although this is not specifically said in the text of her acts commonly read in medieval breviaries, nor in the Golden Legend.

The Mystical Marriage of St Catherine, by Guercino, 1620

The third reason has to do with her place among the Fourteen Holy Helpers. In the 1499 Missal of Bamberg, the Collect of a Votive Mass in their honor reads as follows:

Almighty and merciful God, who didst adorn Thy Saints George, Blase, Erasmus, Pantaleon, Vitus, Christopher, Denis, Cyriacus, Acacius, Eustace, Giles, Margaret, Barbara and Catherine with special privileges above all others, so that all who in their necessities implore their help, according to the grace of Thy promise, may attain the salutary effect of their pleading: grant us, we beseech Thee, forgiveness of our sins, and with their merits interceding, deliver us from all adversities, and kindly hear our prayers.

The words “according to the grace of Thy promise” refer to the tradition that during their passion, each of these Saints received a promise from God that their intercession would be exceptionally effective on behalf of those who honored them. Thus, the third antiphon of Lauds in the proper office of St Catherine reads “I await the sword for Thee, o Jesus, good king; set Thou my spirit in Paradise, and show mercy to those who keep my memory.” To this Christ answers in the fourth antiphon: “A voice sounded from heaven: ‘Come, my chosen one, come, enter the chamber of Thy spouse; thou hast obtained what thou asked; those that praise thee shall be saved.” And the fifth concludes, “Because we keep the memory of thee, o virgin, with devout praises, pray for us, we ask, o blessed Catherine.”

In these three roles, as Patron Saint of philosophers, as a bride of Christ, and as a Holy Helper, St Catherine stands out as a perfect response to the novelties of the Protestant reformers.

After serving for many centuries as the “handmaid of theology,” from the Fathers to Boethius to St Thomas, and particularly after the great scholastic conquest of Aristotle, philosophy, and indeed reason itself, were cast out by Martin Luther as “the Devil’s greatest whore… who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom…” And likewise, “Aristotle is the godless bulwark of the papists. He is to theology what darkness is to light. His ethics is the worst enemy of grace. He is a rank philosopher, … the most artful corrupter of minds. If he had not lived in flesh and bones, I should not scruple to take him for a devil.” As for St. Thomas, “he never understood a chapter of the Gospel or Aristotle … In short, it is impossible to reform the Church if Scholastic theology and philosophy are not torn out by the roots with Canon Law.” St Catherine therefore serves as an example of the Church’s true tradition, one who successfully used philosophy in the preaching and teaching of the Faith.

St Catherine and the Philosophers, from the Castiglione chapel in the Basilica of St Clement in Rome, by Masolino da Panicale, 1425-31. Note how she calmly counts off her reasons for believing the Christian faith, as the philosophers look in confusion in different directions. “We firmly confess this to thee, o emperor, that unless thou shall show us a more likely sect than these which we have followed hitherto; behold, we all convert to Christ, because we confess Him to be true God and the son of God.” (from the Sarum Breviary). At this the emperor orders them to be burnt alive, as seen on the right.

The Protestants also completely rejected any kind of monastic or canonical religious life, leaving no formal place at all for women in the institutional life of the Church. (Luther himself, like so many disaffected religious, married a former nun, whose name, ironically, was Catherine.) The tradition of Christ accepting her in a mystical marriage would therefore validate the institution of consecrated life in general, but particularly for women.

Finally, as a Saint renowned for her powerful intercession on behalf of many classes of people, St Catherine stands with countless others in the “cloud of witnesses” against the early Protestant rejection of devotion to the Saints, and their power to intercede for us in this world.

Even within Luther’s lifetime, it was hardly possible to get two Protestant reformers together to agree on any point; hence, the famous dispute at which he carved “EST – it is” into the table, in reply to Zwingli, who was quite certain that the Lord was only kidding when He said “This IS my body.” Broadly speaking, however, they generally accepted that things had really gone wrong in the Church with the coming of the mendicants, (especially the Franciscans), and the flourishing of their teachings in the universities. Although the life of St Catherine may no longer be regarded as historical, it still bears witness to the Church’s historical belief, before the emergence of the mendicants, in the goodness of reason and philosophy, in the value of consecrated life, and the intercession of the Saints on our behalf.

St Gregory the Wonderworker

Today is the feast of St Gregory the Wonderworker, bishop of Neo-Caesarea in Pontus, his native city, the modern Niksar in north-central Turkey. Born around 215 AD, he and his brother Athenodorus, who also later became a bishop, intended to study law at a famous school in Beirut. Their brother-in-law was appointed as an official of the Roman government of Palestine; the brothers therefore accompanied their sister to the city of Caesarea in that province. (Many cities in the East were called “Caesarea”; the one in Palestine is different from the city where St Basil the Great later served as bishop, also in Turkey.) At the time, the famous scholar Origen had taken up residence in Caesarea; on meeting and conversing with him, the two brothers gave up their plans to study law, and devoted themselves to learning from the great master.

A 14th century Greek icon of St Gregory the Wonderworker. (Public domain image from Wikipedia.)

Among St Gregory’s surviving works is a Panegyric to Origen, preached upon the completion of his studies, before taking leave of his teacher and departing for home. In it, he states that Origen led and encouraged his students to virtue by personal example no less than by exhortation and teaching. Most importantly, he describes how he taught them to distinguish what was true and useful in pagan philosophy and poetry for knowledge of the true God from what was erroneous. A letter of Origen to Gregory also survives, in which he describes how the Christian may make use of what he learns from the pagan world.

“I am anxious that you should devote all the strength of your natural good parts to Christianity for your end; and in order to do this, I wish to ask you to extract from the philosophy of the Greeks what may serve as a course of study or a preparation for Christianity, and from geometry and astronomy what will serve to explain the sacred Scriptures, in order that all that the sons of the philosophers are wont to say about geometry and music, grammar, rhetoric, and astronomy, as fellow-helpers to philosophy, we may say about philosophy itself, in relation to Christianity.

Perhaps something of this kind is foreshadowed in what is written in Exodus from the mouth of God, that the children of Israel were commanded to ask from their neighbors, and those who dwelt with them, vessels of silver and gold, and raiment, in order that, by spoiling the Egyptians, they might have material for the preparation of the things which pertained to the service of God.”

Shortly after returning to Neo-Caesarea, St Gregory was appointed bishop of the tiny Christian community there, said to have only seventeen members at the time. His conversion of the city began with his very first sermon, preached in the house of an important fellow-citizen who hosted him, and followed immediately by numerous miraculous cures of the sick. This was the beginning of a long career of impressive miracles, many of which are recounted by St Basil the Great and his younger brother, St Gregory of Nyssa; by these, he converted so many people that on his deathbed, when he asked how many pagans were left in the city, the answer was “seventeen.” The most famous of these was the moving of a mountain in order to make a convenient space for the building of a church, which had become necessary with the rapid growth of the community, in fulfillment of the Lord’s words which are read in the Gospel for his feast day.

“Have the faith of God. Amen I say to you, that whosoever shall say to this mountain, ‘Be thou lifted up and cast into the sea’, and shall not hesitate in his heart, but believe, that whatsoever he saith shall be done, it shall be done unto him. Therefore I say unto you, all things, whatsoever you ask when ye pray, believe that you shall receive, and they shall come unto you.” (St Mark, 11, 22-24)

Ss Basil and Gregory of Nyssa learned what they knew of St Gregory the Wonderworker from one of his personal disciples, their grandmother, St Macrina the Elder. (St Macrina the Younger is their older sister.) It is through her and her spiritual father that much of Origen’s theological teaching was transmitted to the Cappadocian Fathers, and through them, enters the great tradition of Eastern theology. It is also recounted that before his episcopal consecration, Gregory went on a retreat in the wilderness, during which he was vouchsafed an apparition of the Virgin Mary and St John the Evangelist, who dictated a creed to him. The text of this survives, and the original manuscript of it was still preserved at Neocaesarea in St Basil’s day. The Canon for his feast in the Byzantine Rite refers to the story as follows: “Guided by God, as one who had sought for Him with longing, you obtained as your teachers Mary, the pure Mother of God, and the son of thunder, who taught you the splendor of the Trinity, as one who spoke from God.” Of particular interest is the last article of this short Creed, which speaks of a fully orthodox doctrine of the Trinity more than half a century before the Council of Nicea.

“There is a perfect Trinity, in glory and eternity and sovereignty, neither divided nor estranged. Wherefore there is nothing either created or in servitude in the Trinity; nor anything superinduced, as if at some former period it was non-existent, and at some later period it was introduced. And thus neither was the Son ever wanting to the Father, nor the Spirit to the Son; but without variation and without change, the same Trinity abideth ever.”

The Apparition of the Virgin Mary and St John to St Gregory the Wonderworker, by Giuseppe Cesari (1568-1640), more commonly known as the Cavaliere d’Arpino. From the Borghese Chapel of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, ca. 1612.

Prior to the Tridentine reform, there does not appear to be any devotion to St Gregory in the West. His feast appears, however, in the very first edition of the very first liturgical book of that reform, the Roman Breviary issued by St Pius V in 1568, two years before the Tridentine Missal; it is assigned to November 17, his day in the Byzantine Rite. This is a very unusual change for a reform which is in almost every respect extremely conservative, and which changed the calendar of Saints mostly by removing or downgrading those whose lives were thought to be historically unreliable.

This change, like several others, should be seen as part of the Church’s response to the novelties of the Protestant reformers.

Five hundred years after the 95 Theses, it is perhaps hard for us to properly grasp how radical a break with the whole of Christianity’s first millennium and a half was set in motion by Luther, and how much of the Church’s universally received tradition was lightly set aside as thing of little or no value. In regard to the study of philosophy, there have always been heretics and cranks who rejected it as worthless. One of the very first and most notable of these in antiquity was a Syrian disciple of St Justin Martyr called Tatian (ca. 120-180), who turned heretic, and wrote a very funny, but ultimately absurd, attack on the pagan philosophers and the whole intellectual tradition of the classical world. The vast bulk of Christian tradition, however, stands squarely with Origen in this regard, and with his disciple, St Gregory the Wonderworker, receiving philosophy as the “handmaid of theology”; this is the teaching which they then passed on to the Cappadocian Fathers, whose influence in the Byzantine East can never be overcalculated.

This tradition is fundamental to the writings of the great majority of the Fathers, including those in whom the reformers claimed to find justification for their teachings. And yet, after Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Thomas and countless others, and particularly after the great scholastic conquest of the writings of Aristotle, Luther, with his usual lack of temperance and decorum, sought to cast philosophy, and indeed reason itself, out of the Church as “the Devil’s greatest whore… who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom…” And likewise, “Aristotle is the godless bulwark of the papists. He is to theology what darkness is to light. His ethics is the worst enemy of grace. He is a rank philosopher, … the most artful corrupter of minds. If he had not lived in flesh and bones, I should not scruple to take him for a devil.” As for St. Thomas, “he never understood a chapter of the Gospel or Aristotle … In short, it is impossible to reform the Church if Scholastic theology and philosophy are not torn out by the roots with Canon Law.”

St Gregory the Wonderworker therefore serves as an example of the Church’s true tradition, which makes good use of philosophy as a necessary tool for the proper understanding of the Faith. He further witnesses, through his association with the Cappadocian Fathers, to the universality of that tradition in both East and West.

St Gregory the Wonderworker, from the Menologion of Basil II (11th century; Public domain image from Wikipedia.)

In the post-Conciliar rite, St Gregory was removed from the general calendar as “not of truly universal importance,” a decision which does not speak particularly well of the reformers’ ability to determine which Saints were of truly universal importance. A similar mistake was made with St Catherine of Alexandria, whose life also bears witness to the importance of philosophy in the Christian intellectual tradition. This mistake was happily corrected by yet another Saint who also took a good deal of interest in philosophy, Pope John Paul II, and we may hope that a similar correction will someday take place with St Gregory.

In 1738, Pope Clement XII Corsini (1730-40) decided to add the feast of St Gertrude the Great, who died on November 17, ca. 1302, to the general calendar. Believing that a Saint who moved a mountain should not himself be moved, even by a Pope, her feast was assigned to the 15th. Almost two centuries later, however, Gertrude herself was moved to the 16th, to make way for another giant in the tradition of Christian philosophers, St Albert the Great.

St Catherine of Alexandria in the Counter-Reformation

The acts of St Catherine of Alexandria tell us that she was a noblewoman of immense learning in all the sciences, who at the age of eighteen went to the emperor Maximin Daia (305-312) to reprove him for his persecution of the Church, denouncing the worship of the false gods of the pagans. Unable to respond to her himself, Maximin had her imprisoned, and then brought a group of fifty philosophers to explain to her the folly of Christianity; all of these she converted to the Faith, for which they were put to death. Catherine was returned to prison, where she was visited by the empress and a captain of the emperor’s troops named Porphyry, both of whom were also converted, and soon after martyred. Catherine was then condemned to die by the famous spiked wheel which has long been known as her emblem, but which broke apart on touching her; like so many Saints whom Nature itself and the persecutors’ devices refused to harm, she was then beheaded. As the traditional Collect of her feast states, her body was carried by Angels to Mount Sinai, where first a church, and later the famous monastery were built in her honor.

An icon of the Presentation of Mary, with St Catherine on the far left. (Greek, 18th century). In the Byzantine Rite, the Entrance of the Virgin in the Temple is one of the twelve Great Feasts, most of which are kept with both a Forefeast and Afterfeast, broadly the equivalent of a vigil and octave in the traditional Roman Rite. Afterfeasts vary in length, and those of the Virgin’s Presentation and Nativity are the shortest, only four days, the final day being known as the Leave-taking; the Leavetaking of the Presentation therefore coincides with St Catherine’s feast day. (Photo from Wikimedia Commons by shakko.) 

She became one of the most popular Saints of the High Middle Ages beginning in the 11th century, when some of her relics were brought to the French city of Rouen. Innumerable churches and chapels were dedicated to her, she appears in an extraordinary number of paintings and statues, and her feast day was kept in many places as a holy day of obligation. She has long been honored as a Patron Saint of philosophers and theologians, orators and preachers, (and hence especially by the Dominicans, who kept her feast with an octave until the early 20th century,) but also of women in religious life, students of every sort, millers and wheelwrights. In France, her prestige was very much enhanced by the fact that she was one of the Saints who spoke to St Joan of Arc. She is honored in the Byzantine Rite with the title “Great Martyr”, and named in the preparation rite of the Divine Liturgy; in the Ambrosian Rite, her name was even added to the Canon of the Mass in the later 15th century.

It is painful to relate that no aspect of the life of St Catherine as given in her acts can be considered historically trustworthy. Just to give one of many possible examples, she is named as the “daughter of a king named Costus”, even though Egypt in the early fourth century was a province of the Roman Empire, and had had no king for over three-hundred years. There is no mention of her in the wealth of Egyptian Christian literature for several centuries after her death, or in the various accounts of pilgrims to the monastery on Mt Sinai, which was not originally named for her.

By the time the Roman Breviary was revised after the Council of Trent, scholars had long known that many of the well-known and loved stories of the Saints were not historically reliable. Thus we find several of the Virgin Martyrs who were very popular in the Middle Ages, such as Ss Barbara, Margaret of Antioch and Ss Ursula and Companions, reduced from full offices of nine readings in the Roman Breviary of 1529 to a mere commemoration in the Breviary of St Pius V. Even Ss Cecilia and Agatha, who are named in the Canon of the Mass, were originally kept at the second of three grades; only Ss Agnes, the Roman martyr par excellence among women, Lucy (a rather random choice), and Catherine of Alexandria were kept at the highest grade.

Virgo inter Virgines (The Virgin Mary among the other holy virgins) by the anonymous Netherlandish painter known as the Master of the St Lucy Legend, ca. 1490. The holy Virgins are Ss Apollonia, Ursula, Lucy, Dorothy, Catherine (receiving a ring from the baby Jesus; her red cloak is covered with her symbol, the wheel), Mary Magdalene, Barbara, Agnes, Margaret, Agatha and Cunera, patron of the Rhenen area near Utrecht, said be one of the 11,000 companions of St Ursula. (Click image to enlarge; click here for a complete explanation of the icongraphy.)

The Breviary of St Pius V, first published in 1568, was revised in the last decade of the same century, and a new edition published in 1602. Pope Clement VIII had entrusted the task of correcting the Saints’ lives to the great Cardinal Cesare Baronius, also the principal editor of the first Tridentine edition of the Martyrology. Among Baronius’ collaborators was St Robert Bellarmine, one of the most learned men of his age, who is supposed to have said in regard to St Catherine, “I wish I could believe that she existed.” In his History of the Roman Breviary, Mons. Pierre Batiffol notes (p. 216) that Baronius often refused, against St Robert’s advice, to alter some of the popular legends, despite the historical problems associated with them; and that he noted of St Catherine specifically, “Her history contains many things which are repugnant to the truth.” Nevertheless, her Office was left unaltered, and remained in the same form until the Breviary revision of 1960.

It was certainly a goal of the Tridentine reform of the Breviary to remove from the Church’s public prayer anything that might offer the Protestants a pretext for attack or ridicule. (Baronius was well aware of this problem, and also produced a massive history of the Church, covering the first 12 centuries, in response to Protestant controversialists.) The question therefore arises as to why a Saint whose life was subject to serious doubts, even on the part of the very revisers of the Breviary, was not merely included in it, but celebrated in one of its most prominent feasts.

In part, we may simply say that scholars must at times take their lesson from the devotion of the people, and accept what they may perhaps not understand. (It is interesting to note in this regard that St Catherine was abolished in the Novus Ordo, but restored to the general calendar by Pope St John Paul II.) But there are three aspects of the story of St Catherine that are particularly significant to the Counter-Reformation, which certainly contributed to the preservation of devotion to her.

The first is her role as the Patron Saint of philosophers, which comes, of course, from the story told above of her converting the fifty men sent to dissuade her of her Christian faith.

The second is her role as patron of women in religious life. This arises from the story that Maximin offered to take her on as a second wife or mistress, and even honor her as a goddess, if she would renounce the Faith. To this Catherine replied, “It is a crime even to think of such things. Christ has taken me to Himself as a bride; I have joined myself to Him as a bride in an indissoluble bond.” Other virgin martyrs like Ss Agnes and Agatha also speak of themselves in similar terms, but for whatever reason, it was seen as especially important in Catherine’s case. Therefore, she is very often represented, both before and after the Counter-Reformation, receiving a wedding ring from the infant Christ as He is held by His Mother, joined to him in a mystical marriage, although this is not specifically said in the text of her acts commonly read in medieval breviaries, nor in the Golden Legend.

The Mystical Marriage of St Catherine, by Guercino, 1620

The third reason has to do with her place among the Fourteen Holy Helpers. In the 1499 Missal of Bamberg, the Collect of a Votive Mass in their honor reads as follows:

Almighty and merciful God, who didst adorn Thy Saints George, Blase, Erasmus, Pantaleon, Vitus, Christopher, Denis, Cyriacus, Acacius, Eustace, Giles, Margaret, Barbara and Catherine with special privileges above all others, so that all who in their necessities implore their help, according to the grace of Thy promise, may attain the salutary effect of their pleading: grant us, we beseech Thee, forgiveness of our sins, and with their merits interceding, deliver us from all adversities, and kindly hear our prayers.

The words “according to the grace of Thy promise” refer to the tradition that during their passion, each of these Saints received a promise from God that their intercession would be exceptionally effective on behalf of those who honored them. Thus, the third antiphon of Lauds in the proper office of St Catherine reads “I await the sword for Thee, o Jesus, good king; set Thou my spirit in Paradise, and show mercy to those who keep my memory.” To this Christ answers in the fourth antiphon: “A voice sounded from heaven: ‘Come, my chosen one, come, enter the chamber of Thy spouse; thou hast obtained what thou asked; those that praise thee shall be saved.” And the fifth concludes, “Because we keep the memory of thee, o virgin, with devout praises, pray for us, we ask, o blessed Catherine.”

In these three roles, as Patron Saint of philosophers, as a bride of Christ, and as a Holy Helper, St Catherine stands out as a perfect response to the novelties of the Protestant reformers.

After serving for many centuries as the “handmaid of theology,” from the Fathers to Boethius to St Thomas, and particularly after the great scholastic conquest of Aristotle, philosophy, and indeed reason itself, were cast out by Martin Luther as “the Devil’s greatest whore… who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom…” And likewise, “Aristotle is the godless bulwark of the papists. He is to theology what darkness is to light. His ethics is the worst enemy of grace. He is a rank philosopher, … the most artful corrupter of minds. If he had not lived in flesh and bones, I should not scruple to take him for a devil.” As for St. Thomas, “he never understood a chapter of the Gospel or Aristotle … In short, it is impossible to reform the Church if Scholastic theology and philosophy are not torn out by the roots with Canon Law.” St Catherine therefore serves as an example of the Church’s true tradition, one who successfully used philosophy in the preaching and teaching of the Faith.

St Catherine and the Philosophers, from the Castiglione chapel in the Basilica of St Clement in Rome, by Masolino da Panicale, 1425-31. Note how she calmly counts off her reasons for believing the Christian faith, as the philosophers look in confusion in different directions. “We firmly confess this to thee, o emperor, that unless thou shall show us a more likely sect than these which we have followed hitherto; behold, we all convert to Christ, because we confess Him to be true God and the son of God.” (from the Sarum Breviary). At this the emperor orders them to be burnt alive, as seen on the right.

The Protestants also completely rejected any kind of monastic or canonical religious life, leaving no formal place at all for women in the institutional life of the Church. (Luther himself, like so many disaffected religious, married a former nun, whose name, ironically, was Catherine.) The tradition of Christ accepting her in a mystical marriage would therefore validate the institution of consecrated life in general, but particularly for women.

Finally, as a Saint renowned for her powerful intercession on behalf of many classes of people, St Catherine stands with countless others in the “cloud of witnesses” against the early Protestant rejection of devotion to the Saints, and their power to intercede for us in this world.

Even within Luther’s lifetime, it was hardly possible to get two Protestant reformers together to agree on any point; hence, the famous dispute at which he carved “EST – it is” into the table, in reply to Zwingli, who was quite certain that the Lord was only kidding when He said “This IS my body.” Broadly speaking, however, they generally accepted that things had really gone wrong in the Church with the coming of the mendicants, (especially the Franciscans), and the flourishing of their teachings in the universities. Although the life of St Catherine may no longer be regarded as historical, it still bears witness to the Church’s historical belief, before the emergence of the mendicants, in the goodness of reason and philosophy, in the value of consecrated life, and the intercession of the Saints on our behalf.

St Gregory the Wonderworker

On the calendar of the Extraordinary Form, today is the feast of St Gregory the Wonderworker, bishop of Neo-Caesarea in Pontus, his native city, the modern Niksar in north-central Turkey. Born around 215 AD, he and his brother Athenodorus, who also later became a bishop, intended to study law at a famous school in Beirut. Their brother-in-law was appointed as an official of the Roman government of Palestine; the brothers therefore accompanied their sister to the city of Caesarea in that province. (Many cities in the East were called “Caesarea”; the one in Palestine is different from the city where St Basil the Great later served as bishop, also in Turkey.) At the time, the famous scholar Origen had taken up residence in Caesarea; on meeting and conversing with him, the two brothers gave up their plans to study law, and devoted themselves to learning from the great master.

A 14th century Greek icon of St Gregory the Wonderworker. (Public domain image from Wikipedia.)

Among St Gregory’s surviving works is a Panegyric to Origen, preached upon the completion of his studies, before taking leave of his teacher and departing for home. In it, he states that Origen led and encouraged his students to virtue by personal example no less than by exhortation and teaching. Most importantly, he describes how he taught them to distinguish what was true and useful in pagan philosophy and poetry for knowledge of the true God from what was erroneous. A letter of Origen to Gregory also survives, in which he describes how the Christian may make use of what he learns from the pagan world.

“I am anxious that you should devote all the strength of your natural good parts to Christianity for your end; and in order to do this, I wish to ask you to extract from the philosophy of the Greeks what may serve as a course of study or a preparation for Christianity, and from geometry and astronomy what will serve to explain the sacred Scriptures, in order that all that the sons of the philosophers are wont to say about geometry and music, grammar, rhetoric, and astronomy, as fellow-helpers to philosophy, we may say about philosophy itself, in relation to Christianity.

Perhaps something of this kind is foreshadowed in what is written in Exodus from the mouth of God, that the children of Israel were commanded to ask from their neighbors, and those who dwelt with them, vessels of silver and gold, and raiment, in order that, by spoiling the Egyptians, they might have material for the preparation of the things which pertained to the service of God.”

Shortly after returning to Neo-Caesarea, St Gregory was appointed bishop of the tiny Christian community there, said to have only seventeen members at the time. His conversion of the city began with his very first sermon, preached in the house of an important fellow-citizen who hosted him, and followed immediately by numerous miraculous cures of the sick. This was the beginning of a long career of impressive miracles, many of which are recounted by St Basil the Great and his younger brother, St Gregory of Nyssa; by these, he converted so many people that on his deathbed, when he asked how many pagans were left in the city, the answer was “seventeen.” The most famous of these was the moving of a mountain in order to make a convenient space for the building of a church, which had become necessary with the rapid growth of the community, in fulfillment of the Lord’s words which are read in the Gospel for his feast day.

“Have the faith of God. Amen I say to you, that whosoever shall say to this mountain, ‘Be thou lifted up and cast into the sea’, and shall not hesitate in his heart, but believe, that whatsoever he saith shall be done, it shall be done unto him. Therefore I say unto you, all things, whatsoever you ask when ye pray, believe that you shall receive, and they shall come unto you.” (St Mark, 11, 22-24)

Ss Basil and Gregory of Nyssa learned what they knew of St Gregory the Wonderworker from one of his personal disciples, their grandmother, St Macrina the Elder. (St Macrina the Younger is their older sister.) It is through her and her spiritual father that much of Origen’s theological teaching was transmitted to the Cappadocian Fathers, and through them, enters the great tradition of Eastern theology. It is also recounted that before his episcopal consecration, Gregory went on a retreat in the wilderness, during which he was vouchsafed an apparition of the Virgin Mary and St John the Evangelist, who dictated a creed to him. The text of this survives, and the original manuscript of it was still preserved at Neocaesarea in St Basil’s day. The Canon for his feast in the Byzantine Rite refers to the story as follows: “Guided by God, as one who had sought for Him with longing, you obtained as your teachers Mary, the pure Mother of God, and the son of thunder, who taught you the splendor of the Trinity, as one who spoke from God.” Of particular interest is the last article of this short Creed, which speaks of a fully orthodox doctrine of the Trinity more than half a century before the Council of Nicea.

“There is a perfect Trinity, in glory and eternity and sovereignty, neither divided nor estranged. Wherefore there is nothing either created or in servitude in the Trinity; nor anything superinduced, as if at some former period it was non-existent, and at some later period it was introduced. And thus neither was the Son ever wanting to the Father, nor the Spirit to the Son; but without variation and without change, the same Trinity abideth ever.”

The Apparition of the Virgin Mary and St John to St Gregory the Wonderworker, by Giuseppe Cesari (1568-1640), more commonly known as the Cavaliere d’Arpino. From the Borghese Chapel of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, ca. 1612.

Prior to the Tridentine reform, there does not appear to be any devotion to St Gregory in the West. His feast appears, however, in the very first edition of the very first liturgical book of that reform, the Roman Breviary issued by St Pius V in 1568, two years before the Tridentine Missal; it is assigned to November 17, his day in the Byzantine Rite. This is a very unusual change for a reform which is in almost every respect extremely conservative, and which changed the calendar of Saints mostly by removing or downgrading those whose lives were thought to be historically unreliable.

This change, like several others, should be seen as part of the Church’s response to the novelties of the Protestant reformers.

Five hundred years after the 95 Theses, it is perhaps hard for us to properly grasp how radical a break with the whole of Christianity’s first millennium and a half was set in motion by Luther, and how much of the Church’s universally received tradition was lightly set aside as thing of little or no value. In regard to the study of philosophy, there have always been heretics and cranks who rejected it as worthless. One of the very first and most notable of these in antiquity was a Syrian disciple of St Justin Martyr called Tatian (ca. 120-180), who turned heretic, and wrote a very funny, but ultimately absurd, attack on the pagan philosophers and the whole intellectual tradition of the classical world. The vast bulk of Christian tradition, however, stands squarely with Origen in this regard, and with his disciple, St Gregory the Wonderworker, receiving philosophy as the “handmaid of theology”; this is the teaching which they then passed on to the Cappadocian Fathers, whose influence in the Byzantine East can never be overcalculated.

This tradition is fundamental to the writings of the great majority of the Fathers, including those in whom the reformers claimed to find justification for their teachings. And yet, after Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Thomas and countless others, and particularly after the great scholastic conquest of the writings of Aristotle, Luther, with his usual lack of temperance and decorum, sought to cast philosophy, and indeed reason itself, out of the Church as “the Devil’s greatest whore… who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom…” And likewise, “Aristotle is the godless bulwark of the papists. He is to theology what darkness is to light. His ethics is the worst enemy of grace. He is a rank philosopher, … the most artful corrupter of minds. If he had not lived in flesh and bones, I should not scruple to take him for a devil.” As for St. Thomas, “he never understood a chapter of the Gospel or Aristotle … In short, it is impossible to reform the Church if Scholastic theology and philosophy are not torn out by the roots with Canon Law.”

St Gregory the Wonderworker therefore serves as an example of the Church’s true tradition, which makes good use of philosophy as a necessary tool for the proper understanding of the Faith. He further witnesses, through his association with the Cappadocian Fathers, to the universality of that tradition in both East and West.

St Gregory the Wonderworker, from the Menologion of Basil II (11th century; Public domain image from Wikipedia.)

In the post-Conciliar reform, St Gregory was removed from the general calendar as “not of truly universal importance,” a decision which does not speak particularly well of the reformers’ ability to determine which Saints were of truly universal importance. A similar mistake was made with St Catherine of Alexandria, whose life also bears witness to the importance of philosophy in the Christian intellectual tradition. This mistake was happily corrected by yet another Saint who also took a good deal of interest in philosophy, Pope John Paul II, and we may hope that a similar correction will someday take place with St Gregory.

In 1738, Pope Clement XII Corsini (1730-40) decided to add the feast of St Gertrude the Great, who died on November 17, ca. 1302, to the general calendar. Believing that a Saint who moved a mountain should not himself be moved, even by a Pope, her feast was assigned to the 15th. Almost two centuries later, however, Gertrude herself was moved to the 16th, to make way for another giant in the tradition of Christian philosophers, St Albert the Great.

Aquinas Institute Announces Two Online Programs: Liberal Arts and Graduate Theology

Many readers of NLM will have heard of the Aquinas Institute owing to its blue hardcover Opera Omnia series of bilingual editions of the works of St. Thomas, the most recent addition to which is a two-volume set of his Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics.

The Aquinas Institute has announced the launch of Online Discussion Classes, at two levels:

• A Graduate Theology Curriculum, consisting of 12 integrated courses towards an MA in theology. Courses may be taken 1, 2, or 3 at a time. Anyone seeking a serious engagement with the greatest sources of theology should check out this program, as nothing else quite like it exists in the USA. Graduate courses begin the week of September 14th:

- The Book of Job, Dr. Nathan Schmiedecke (Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary)
- Existence and Attributes of God, Dr. John Mortensen (Aquinas Institute)
- Church Fathers I, Dr. Michael Foley (Baylor University)

• An undergraduate Liberal Arts Core Curriculum consisting of 12 courses in humanities, philosophy, and theology, to be taken 3 at a time. This program is for students ready to do college-level work, students already enrolled in state universities looking for a way to fulfill general education requirements, and people of any age group and background who want to fill in gaps in their own education. The courses are accredited by collaboration with Wyoming Catholic College. Undergraduate courses begin the week of September 21st:

- Gods & Heroes in Ancient Greece, Dr. Jason Baxter (Wyoming Catholic College)
- Tools of Philosophy, Jacob Terneus (Marquette University)
- Salvation History I, Dr. Vincent DeMeo (International Theological Institute)

Both programs are built on two principles:

(1) Primary Sources: we read, e.g., works by Plato and Aristotle for philosophy, Augustine and Aquinas for theology, Dante and Shakespeare for humanities -- not textbooks or random bits and pieces;

(2) Discussion: the classes take the form of interactive conversations guided by Catholic teachers passionate about their subjects.

The cost is comparable to similar online programs, and scholarships are available.

Read more at the Aquinas Institute website.

Book Recommendation: Ben Shapiro’s Right Side of History

Last month, I recommended a modern theology manual as a complement and introduction to the fundamental texts; this week, I am going to recommend what might be considered a manual for the study of Western Civilization. Ben Shapiro’s The Right Side of History - How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great is written as a response to all those, whether on the right or the left, who dislike the West, exemplified by the America we live in today. He argues that the worldview from which the American project emerged is a harmonious fusion of faith in the God of the Bible, and reason. It is a synthesis of philosophy and theology, and, unusually (and I believe correctly), he sees faith and theology as governing philosophy.

I am recommending this book for two reasons. First, I think that Catholic educators will find this a good introductory text for a course on Western Civilization, perhaps for high school students, or as part of the general education of undergraduates. It is written for a broader audience than Catholics; I would therefore suggest that should be supplemented with additional texts that present the Catholic understanding of some of what he describes in a more nuanced way - I suggest one below - even before going more deeply into the study of philosophers whose work Catholics are naturally most interested in, such as Aristotle and St Thomas. Shapiro’s work will help create a context in which their ideas can be placed today.

Second, I am hoping that those Catholic readers who are not enamored with the American project, and are inclined to dismiss it as a flawed product of poor Enlightenment thinking, might investigate and perhaps be swayed by his arguments. As I see him, Shapiro is a cheerful realist, who can recognize its imperfections, but loves present-day America; and, recognizing that there are forces bent on destroying it, he is prepared to roll up his sleeves and work to preserve what he believes is so good about it. The worldview that created a society that can produce wealth in great abundance is also the one, he argues, that promotes the spiritual values which are the basis of personal happiness.

Sadly, if there is one idea that has the power to unite large numbers of people with otherwise diverse political or religious beliefs, it is the idea that America is bad. They might disagree on what is wrong with America, and what ought to be done about it, but they can agree on one certain truth, that we all live in a bad place.

There are, for example, those on the political left who consider the institutions of the United States to be founded upon slavery, racism, and sexism by an oppressive patriarchy consisting of white, male Christians (and the occasional Orthodox Jew). The left thinks America is bad because it is the perfect manifestation of the traditional Judeo-Christian worldview that underlies this oppression. They are working hard to displace the heritage of the past with a new society that is distinct from both the recent and distant past. The left believes that the answer to America’s perceived problems is the forcible redistribution of wealth and control of society by the government. In their view, elite intellectuals, who know better than most people themselves what is good for them are the ones who should direct policy. The left is unhappy with America because they feel that there is not yet enough government control by the people they approve of. For them, America is, in short, still too American for comfort.

Then there are people who like what they think America used to be, but not what it is now. Typically, and unlike the left, they believe that America was founded on principles of personal freedom and dignity for all. They believe that the principles themselves are good and would like to see them better reflected in the America of today. Accordingly, they assert the goodness of the Constitution and the American system of governance as it was set up. However, they are unhappy because they believe that the left has taken over the culture and institutions of the country today and that America is no longer what it ought to be. They look wistfully back to some past America in which people could flourish in a way that they cannot now. For this type of political conservative America is not American enough.

There is another much smaller group of people who like the others dislikes America, but looks even further back in time to their golden period. These are socially conservative, traditionally-minded Christians, typically Catholics. I come across this point of view regularly, because I share their interest in the importance of culture, although we often differ on what to do about it. In their view, it is the negative aspects of the Protestant Reformation and the philosophical errors of modernity that have formed the West we live in today. For them, so much of what they don’t like – the ugliness of the modern culture, the decline in the Faith, the loss of orthodoxy in the Church’s hierarchy and the banality of its liturgy – are due to these aberrations of faith and philosophy. This last group is not happy with any form of America. They criticize the Constitution because they feel it is, at least in part, rooted in a wrong understanding of human nature and of human freedom. They do believe in Western values, but the West they admire is one that existed in a European, pre-Reformation past. They yearn for a society that is culturally Catholic to its core, a society of kings, Gothic cathedrals, wool merchants and guilds. For them, America is bad precisely because it is America and not 14th-century Europe.

This last group is of interest to me. It demonstrates the power of the appeal of Marx-inspired leftist criticism of capitalism even amongst conservative Catholics. For, strangely, a significant proportion of traditionally-minded Catholics find themselves agreeing with the left in their dislike of capitalism and free markets. Like the left, they accept the Marxist inspired radical-environmentalist scare stories, and tales of the injustice of capitalism, and they despise what they believe to be the suffering and ugliness caused by industrialization and mass production. The Catholic critics of capitalism don’t have the same options as everyone else when it comes to proposing a solution to the current situation. Socialism has been condemned by the Catholic Church. As a result, they are always looking for ‘third-option’ solutions that sit between the ‘extremes’ of free-market capitalism on the one hand and socialism on the other. The economic theory called Distributism, which has been around for a hundred years or so, is perhaps the best known of these hypothetical third ways, although its place in the field of economics has always been marginal at best.

In summary, the political left believes that man can create a Utopia here on earth. They hate the present and romanticize the future. Unhappy conservatives on the other hand, are uncomfortable with the present and romanticize the past.

Shapiro’s book has a response to all of these groups. He is both a political and social conservative (he is an Orthodox Jew), but he loves present-day America too and wants to preserve what is good about it and help it to flourish more strongly.

My quick survey of the types of people who dislike America today is, I acknowledge, incomplete, generalized and simplistic. But I hope it makes the general point: that there are many people who are unhappy in the America we live in today for a range of different reasons. The response to all of them is to say that they are mistaken. America is a good place to live in. You may prefer other cultures or the geography of other places, but to say you don’t like it is not the same as it is bad.

Shapiro’s message is that life is good, right now. The West, in general, is good, and America is good too. None are perfect, but all are good. He produces a raft of statistics to show the truth of this in material terms. Never before have more people lived in such prosperity and enjoyed such freedom as today. Prosperity and freedom do not guarantee faith and personal happiness, but they are the conditions in which a culture of faith and virtue can flourish, he argues. It is a life of faith in God and of virtue (of ‘moral purpose’) that will give us happiness. And I say that he is right.

However, while noting that the external circumstances are as favorable to personal happiness as they have ever been, there is, as he notes, a problem. While we in the West should be happier than ever before, by all measures - suicide rates for example - the society as a whole is not. There are in fact more unhappy people in America today than ever before. How can this be?

It is a maxim that happiness is ‘an inside job’. This is true for every person, conservative or socialist, past or present. Ultimately, bad personal choices and a rejection of God’s grace - sin - lead to unhappiness. Mankind has been granted the freedom to choose to be miserable or joyful at all times in history since the Fall. However, as Shapiro points out, what is causing so much unhappiness today is the promotion and ever more general adoption of a worldview that fosters and encourages personal misery. Furthermore, the flawed philosophy of the atheist and materialist left not only undermines Western culture and values and the material prosperity it produces, but it also engenders personal unhappiness.

And, if the left succeeds in their aim of destroying traditional Western and American values, they will bring us all down, for whether they like to admit it or not, they are parasites on the West. Socialism is a Western heresy that cannot exist for long without a Judeo-Christian inspired infrastructure to support it.

To quote the book:

We are in the process of abandoning Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, favoring instead moral subjectivism and the rule of passion. And we are watching our civilization collapse into age-old tribalism, individualistic hedonism, and moral subjectivism. We believe we can reject Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law and satisfy ourselves with intersectionality, or scientific materialism, or progressive politics, or authoritarian governance, or nationalistic solidarity.

I agree with Ben Shapiro.

We need a genuine understanding of the West so that we can engage with others in a process of education and persuasion. I think that his book is a valuable contribution to this noble aim. It is a balanced view that bears the optimism appropriate to someone of faith, and the realism of one who knows that no civilization is guaranteed permanence unless its citizens work to preserve it.

The Right Side of History gives us the story of the development of Western thought. Through this narrative, Shapiro tells us who we are, where we have come from, and our telos, that is, our purpose - where we are going. He explains how the fusion of Greek philosophy with Christian and Jewish thought created the unique conditions that allowed the West to flourish. He does not shy away from pointing out how important it is that the Jewish and Christian faiths are different from all other faiths in stressing the dignity of the human person, who is made (going back to the account of the Creation in the book of Genesis) in the image and likeness of God, and endowed with personal freedom.

Rather than seeing the Enlightenment as a radical break with the past, he shows how many Enlightenment thinkers were believers who contributed to a steady development of Western thought which is very much in accordance with the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is from this, largely British, Enlightenment that the American constitution and nation was established. Far from undermining what was so good about medieval society, it developed and enriched what preceded it.

Highlighting the source of the problems today, Shapiro describes how a flawed philosophical worldview did also develop out of Enlightenment thinking. Broadly speaking, it is from the Continental Enlightenment that we see the development of the atheistic-materialism of the left, with all its hatred of capitalism, freedom and destructive ideas of intersectionality. This is the worldview that has been the cause of so much misery in the past, and continues to create it today.

In order to back up his hypothesis, we are introduced to the philosophies of Aristotle and the ancient Greeks, to Aquinas, Descartes and Kant, Hume, Hegel, and Marx, Burke and Adam Smith and many other key figures. All of this is told in clear accessible language that assumes reasonable intelligence but a low base of knowledge. As such it is a wonderful introduction to Western thought, good and bad. Throughout, he never loses sight of the grand picture of the story of the West, which means that we can clearly see in each case which ideas are in harmony with what is good and true and beautiful in the world, or conversely, which work against it. As such, this book should be part of the general education of every young person in America, and, I would say, especially Catholics.

If on reading this, those traditionalist Catholic friends of mine who I mentioned earlier are still not convinced that the ideas that Shapiro articulates are consistent with Catholic social teaching, they should read also Samuel Greggs’ excellent Reason, Faith and the Struggle for Western Civilization. Gregg addresses the same subject in a similar way, but focuses more on addressing the nuanced objections of conservative Catholics who are inclined to mistrust all the philosophical developments of the last 400 years. I reviewed Gregg’s book here.

In my judgment, the two books work together beautifully to equip any well-intentioned person of faith who wants to build a better society with some basic tools to do so. There is no Utopia on offer, as both Shapiro and Gregg are quick to point out; that is the false promise of the left, and no society can guarantee personal happiness. However, culture and politics can work either to encourage it or to undermine it. We can and should always work for those conditions that will help people to choose well.

If we care at all about alleviating poverty, preserving life, and nurturing a culture that helps people to choose well by supporting and reflecting the values of faith and virtue, then Shapiro’s book will help us. It gives us a picture of a society that promotes all three.

If we follow this path, we are bound also to respect the freedom and dignity of those who disagree with us, even if at times they do not grant us the same privilege. If this seems an insuperable handicap against a foe who won’t play fairly, then I would say that it probably is. Or rather, it would be if we didn’t have God on our side. I believe we are on the right side, not only of history but of the present too! I wouldn’t be arguing from the position that I am if I didn’t believe so, and this is why I am not daunted or pessimistic.

We may lose battles, we may go down to the depths first, but I hold to the principle that good will prevail. The trinity of the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and charity, has been brought into the consciousness of the West through St Paul’s epistles. Although Shapiro is an Orthodox Jew, and as such, does not acknowledge the divine authorship of the New Testament, his writing of has crystalized the same truth, that faith, hope, and charity are the beating heart of the good society.

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.

Josias Podcast on Liturgy and the Common Good

Peter recently participated in an episode of the Josias Podcast, a discussion of the deep and essential connection between the liturgy and the common good, along with the regular hosts, and Mr Jonathan Culbreath, whose published an interesting article in April on Liturgy and the Common Good at Peregrine Magazine. Along the way, they discuss the liturgy as focal point for the common good in the Church and in secular society, public versus private devotion, and compare Charles de Koninck’s defense of the common good against personalists and totalitarians with Erik Peterson and Romano Guardini’s defense of the liturgy against certain members of the liturgical reform movement. Several links to further reading on the topic are given over at their website.

An allegory of St Francis Xavier as the patron of Lucerne, Switerland, on the ceiling of the church dedicated to him in that city. At the top, he is shown riding a chariot like the prophet Elijah, which is pulled by exotic animals (an elephant, a cheetah and a camel), symbolizing the various parts of the world reached by his missionary activities. On the white and blue banner of the city is written “To St Francis Xavier, Protector of the City and Region.” To the left, the citizens, led by the bishop, look to him in heaven; the façade of the church is seen at the bottom.