Book Review
Knowledge Revival
Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education
by Stratford Caldecott
Brazos Press, 2009
(156 pages, $23.00, paperback)
reviewed by Stephen Richard Turley
Stratford Caldecott, director of the Center for Faith and Culture in Oxford and editor of the journal Second Spring for Thomas More College, describes this book as a “manifesto” that focuses on recovering the centrality of meaning for education. Caldecott develops his argument in terms of both a negative and a positive apologetic: he aims to challenge the schisms between the arts and sciences, and faith and reason, which are characteristic of the modern age, by advocating a return to the classical conception of knowledge.
Knowledge in the pre-modern period was the instrument of wisdom, that is, an embodied understanding of the world as cosmos, as a grand arena of meaning and purpose constituted by a semiotic collage of harmoniously integrated parts united in a single whole, called the Logos. In contrast, knowledge in the modern era is specific to the scientific method of empirical verifiability. Since meaning and purpose are impervious to method—that is, since telos does not fit into a test tube—the world is reduced to cause-and-effect processes that have no inherent meaning or purpose. The result is that the Logos and its inherent Socratic triad of truth, goodness, and beauty have been amputated from knowledge in the modern age, pushed into the periphery of public life, and relegated solely to the subjective.
Thus Caldecott concludes: “The divisions between arts and sciences, between faith and reason, between nature and grace, have a common root,” which is “a failure to understand the full scope of human reason and its true grandeur” (p. 12). Indeed, modern epistemology, being limited to empirically verifiable facts and data, suffers from a reductionism that risks the loss of knowledge itself. Caldecott seeks to forestall this by calling us back to the enchantment and grandeur of a classical vision of knowledge.
Over the course of six chapters, he navigates the way back to classical epistemology by describing the constituent elements of its cosmology. If there were an implicit refrain throughout this work, it would be that transcendent conceptions and understandings of the true, the good, and the beautiful are wedded reciprocally to and thus contingent upon a particular kind of cosmology. In other words, there is a reciprocity between how we know and what we know.
Through the Logocentric Cosmos
In chapter one, “The Tradition of the Four Ways,” Caldecott introduces the Latin quadrivium, which focused on acquainting the student with the various constituents of the logocentric order of the cosmos, namely, mathematics, geometry, music, and astronomy. He gives a historical tour of the development of the “four ways”: from Plato’s quest for unity with “the Good” to its subsequent transfiguration into a revelation of the Trinity, where the Logos is manifested in “the sphere of love” (p. 36). Trinitarian theology thus provides “an important place of integration in the arts and sciences” (p. 30).
In chapter two, “Educating the Poetic Imagination,” Caldecott explains how the order and symmetry of the cosmos constituted a divine semiotic arena that invited the human imagination to make metaphors and draw analogies between the arena of creation and divine images. At the heart of this cosmology is a micro-macro relationship between the individual human person and the larger macrocosmic world. For example, as the larger macrocosmos is constituted by a Logos, a divine order, symmetry, or ratio, so the microcosmic human person has a logos, a rationality that can discern and appreciate such a divine order.
Chapters three and four introduce the reader to the world of sacred number and geometry. The divine origin of numbers accounts for the order and symmetry of the cosmos. For example, the cosmos contains numerous binaries, such as God/man, heaven/earth, good/evil, life/death, hot/cold, man/woman, and light/darkness, which can be numerically represented by the numbers 1 and 0, which together make the number 10, the Decad, representing the cosmos as a whole. The cosmic significance of 10 entails the importance of the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4, together comprising the so-called tetraktys (below), which not only add up to 10, but also account for the four mathematical dimensions (point, line, plane, and solid) and the four elements that make up the cosmos (earth, air, fire, and water).
Caldecott further sees mathematics as a means of contemplating the nature and being of God. He observes, for example, that “every natural number is a multiple of 1. But 1 multiplied or divided by 1 is 1. This makes 1 x 1 / 1 a kind of arithmetical ‘icon’ of the Trinity” (pp. 75–76).
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on education from the online archives
28.5—Sept/Oct 2015
on Our Sacred Duty to Teach the Devil to Death by Marcus Johnson
20.8—October 2007
The Deep & Abiding Biblical Roots of Western Liberal Education by David Lyle Jeffrey
27.2—March/April 2014
Higher Education Should Advance the Glorious Liberty of the Sons of God by Anthony Esolen
more from the online archives
30.2—March/April 2017
on Reading Don Quixote in Its Original Christian Context by Luis Cortest
33.3—May/June 2020
Human & Divine Societies Require Careful Thought & Discourse by Anthony Esolen
37.5—Sept/Oct 2024
The Death of Conservatism & the Negative World by J. Douglas Johnson
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
