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Beyond the Gap… Stratford Caldecott † 17 July 2014 In Memory Eternal

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By Russell Sparkes

It seems scarcely possible that we have arrived at the seventh anniversary of Stratford Caldecott’s death. While a deeply personal tragedy for his wife and children, his death was also a great loss for the Catholic Church in the English speaking world. Not infrequently people bemoan the lack of serious Catholic thinkers who can enter into dialogue with modern society on the issues of the day. For example, in 2016 a Tablet headline stated, “Archbishop Martin bemoans shortage of Catholic intellectuals”. Yet in Stratford we had a great Catholic intellectual, even if he received little official recognition or support during his lifetime. Moreover, it seems particularly important to think of his work right now, after the experience of the worldwide pandemic of 2020/2021.

I will list here just a couple of the issues which Strat so presciently raised and discussed. I suspect that education may well be one of his most lasting legacies. In two important books, Beauty for Truth’s Sake (2009), and Beauty in the Word (2012), and for the first time since Newman, a Catholic thinker took a long, hard look at the point and purpose of education. In retrospect, it is obvious that this needed to be done, in a world where many universities seem to have metamorphosed from institutes of study designed to deepen and cultivate young minds, into profit-maximising institutions of mass learning. At the same time, many students these days leave university with their lives blighted by a mountain of debt. There is a great need for others to follow Strat’s lead in assessing this depressing situation from a Catholic perspective.

But it may be as a commentator on the subject of Catholic Social Teaching (CST) that he is most missed. Recently, I was researching CST ahead of giving some lectures on the subject at Saint Mary’s University. This work involved looking at all the introductions to CST that I could find, and realised that Strat’s little booklet of 2001, Catholic Social Teaching—A Way In is the first book on the subject that I would give to an interested student. It is out of date now, of course, being written long before the appearance of Laudato Si in 2015. Many authors on CST either seem to fall into the trap of treating the subject matter in a dry, dusty way that gives the impression that it is of no practical importance, or they adopt the tendentious approach of using aspects of the teaching to support their own political and social views.

In contrast, I think that for Strat, Catholic Social Teaching was always meant to be a guide to follow in our daily lives. For some thirty years he worked through the Centre for Faith and Culture as a means of encouraging all people of goodwill, not only Catholics, to do so. In fact, I would argue that the failure of Catholics to promote this teaching to a wider audience has had negative consequences for society as a whole. Many people are worried by the rise to power of right-wing demagogues across the world. In political terms, this probably reflects the failure of the centre ground to find an alternative to the free-market fundamentalism which has swept the world since the Thatcher-Reagan revolution of the 1980s. There is no doubt that economic inequality has significantly increased during this period, and a feeling that they are being left behind probably explains why many people who would normally vote Democrat or Labour, voted instead for Trump or Boris Johnson. I find it striking that some people on the political left in the UK, such as Matthew Taylor, the former head of Tony Blair’s No 10 think-tank, or the Labour peer Lord Glasman, have argued for CST as currently being an intellectually coherent alternative to free-market ideology. Against this background, Strat’s 2001 remark that “Catholic Social Teaching is an idea whose time has come” (Catholic Social Teaching, CTS 2003) looks prophetic— time will tell.

A Wide-ranging and Prescient Thinker

Strat was, of course, a distinguished theologian, and was recognised as such by intellectual peers such as David Schindler and Adrian Walker. I suspect that if he had been an American, Strat would have ended up as a Professor of Applied Theology at a top university like Notre Dame or the Catholic University of America.  His books cover a surprisingly wide range, as do his academic articles: the liturgy, Catholic Social Teaching, von Balthasar, education, the potential threat from technology, and so on. Strat was also remarkably percipient. For example, he was the first person to argue in a detailed and cogent way (in his book Secret Fire [2003]), that JRR Tolkien‘s Lord of the Rings cycle is based upon a deeply Catholic way of thinking. Since this book came out, other academic tomes have appeared on this subject: but Strat was the first. He was also one of the first people to urge the Church to engage with the subject of climate change, and to try and enter into constructive dialogue with environmentalists about it.

Yet Stratford’s writings were only one part of his work. There were all the projects he initiated or supported, and the network of people he encouraged. All this would have been a great achievement for somebody who possessed the financial security and administrative support of a senior university post. However—and I must be critical here—this great workload was managed without any consistent support from the English academic community or from the Catholic Church in England for a large part of his life. Indeed, Strat often had to juggle two or even three jobs at once to provide a basic income for his family. After Strat’s death, American priest Dwight Longenecker made the following comment:

Strat, being a Catholic intellectual, remained an outsider…. He didn’t really fit in in English Catholic circles because he actually did something. He didn’t wait to be asked and didn’t wait to be thanked. He organised international conferences, he started publishing houses, intellectual journals and worked tirelessly, editing, writing, encouraging writers and quietly building up an impressive and powerful body of work.

If you ever climb up into the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, you will see a small memorial plaque to its architect, Christopher Wren: “Reader, if you seek his memorial—look around you”. When I think of Strat’s life and achievements, I am reminded of these words.     

Stratford’s personality was also a major factor in his life and work. Strat would always try, gently and kindly, to see the other person’s point of view. It is a sad fact that the Catholic Church is riven by a gulf between conservatives and liberals, yet Strat, stoutly orthodox in his thinking, was respected by people on both sides as a deep thinker with no axe to grind. His own journey of faith, from New Age beliefs to Catholicism, also made him very receptive to those trying to feel their way to the truth.

Strat was received into the Catholic Church in 1980. As a cradle Catholic, I have often observed that those who have converted make the loudest noises about the Faith. When this occurs, I sometimes wish that they would put down their megaphone and just listen. That was never the case with Strat. He was quiet, gentle, and otherworldly. In fact, he had a kind of spiritual aura that attracted people to him. This gift came at a price: a great deal of time and energy spent on those who approached him.

Personal Memories of Strat

I first met him in 1973, when we both came up to Hertford College, Oxford together, and we remained friends for over 40 years. Although we have very different personality types, we instantly clicked. We both enjoyed fantasy writing, especially Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Both of us had experienced what we felt to be prophetic and meaningful dreams. Each of us was put off by the dry academicism of the subjects we had to immerse ourselves in for our degrees; economics for me, and psychology for Stratford. At that time, we were both searching for meaning. Strat was looking to move beyond the New Age agnosticism of his parents; I was a Catholic who was unsettled by the massive changes that had recently taken place in the UK Church, coupled with the normal uncertainties of adolescence.

Strat could surprise you. Although he always looked like a quiet, introverted scholar, in his youth he would leap down flights of stairs with balletic athleticism. He always thrashed me when we played table tennis. And I remember being astonished when he told me how, before coming up to Oxford, he had hiked on his own in the Appalachian mountains!

His parents, both of whom were South Africans who, being on the radical left, had fled the apartheid regime in the early 1950s to come to England. His father Oliver was a short man with a goatee beard reminiscent of a white jazz artist in the 1950s. He had one of those deep, gravelly South African accents, and very occasionally, when Strat was moved or excited, I could hear a faint South African echo in his own voice, even though he was born in London. I well remember visits to Strat’s family home in Dulwich, South London. There was a combination of great warmth and energy with intellectual speculation. If you have read JD Salinger’s Franny and Zoey books you will know what I mean.

Oliver was a highly talented publisher who was constantly seeking for meaning in his own life, although given his political views this did not include organized religion! Indeed, he was a significant figure in causing the growing interest in the 1960s and 1970s in the New Age (for example, he introduced Carlos Castaneda to the UK). Another very successful book of Oliver’s was Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, which was in fact the first book that Strat worked on as an editor.

In the 1980s Strat introduced me to G.K. Chesterton as a serious religious and social thinker, rather than just as the author of the Father Brown detective stories which I knew. From that time onwards, Chesterton was a major influence on Strat’s thinking, perhaps exceeded only by the great theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. Indeed, from the 1990s Strat and I worked together to update Chesterton’s old ‘Distributist’ ideas under the heading of the ‘Sane Economy Project‘, our concern being that the growing disparity between the superabundance of the super-rich and the pauperisation of the lower middle class would lead to the kind of social and political unrest mentioned earlier.

I have often wondered, although I never got round to asking Strat this, whether he ever saw a parallel with GK Chesterton in terms of his relationship to his father on the subject of religion. Chesterton converted to Catholicism in 1922, shortly after the death of his father, a Unitarian who was tolerant of everything except Catholicism, which he saw as a dogmatic anachronism. I suspect that Oliver may have had similar views about Stratford’s own reception into the Church in 1980.

I am not going to say much about Strat’s career, except to say that, like his father he was a talented publisher, working with the leading academic publisher Routledge in the 1980s, where he specialised in philosophy and religion. They sent him for a couple of years to Boston. In 1988 he moved to the venerable publishing house of William Collins. However, within a year Collins was taken over by News International, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, and Strat quickly realised that he would have to move on once more.

For some time he and his wife Léonie had been thinking of the urgent need for contemporary Catholics to tackle questions of faith and culture. With great courage in my view, bearing in mind that at that time he had a young family, Strat set up the Centre for Faith and Culture to do this. (Indeed, it is important to note that throughout his adult life Strat’s wife Léonie was his intellectual partner and close collaborator, so when I mention Strat’s work, this also refers to her.) This meant that rather than looking for another senior job in publishing, he took a part-time role as commissioning editor with theology publisher TT Clark to provide some income, and relied upon the Centre for Faith and Culture, for several years based at minor educational establishments in Oxford, to do the rest.

The only other author I am aware of who also possessed Strat’s integrated, deep understanding of the links between faith and culture was the great medieval historian, Christopher Dawson. Dawson, who was also a Catholic convert, had spent his working life showing how the civilization of medieval Europe was able to emerge from the ruins of ancient Rome and the anarchy of the Dark Ages only because it was based upon deep Christian foundations. So it seems fitting that Strat’s first book should have been as Editor of a collection of essays on Dawson, entitled Eternity in Time (1997). There is also a striking similarity with Strat in that Dawson’s last major work was a move from his normal field of history into that of education, entitled the Crisis of Western Education (1961), which urged the creation of a liberal arts movement in schools. A quotation from Strat’s concluding article in Eternity in Time sums up his views and agreement with Dawson, and also leads on nicely to my final section:

As Christopher Dawson saw so well, every human culture flourishes on the basis of a religious faith that requires self-transcendence. Our emerging “culture of death” tries to ape this process by a continual ferment of technological and speculative innovation, but all that results is an expanding flux of activity on the material level, and on the psychological level an addiction to change and novelty. In the culture of death, there is no transcending the material level, for nothing that cannot be measured is regarded as objectively real.

The Centre for Faith and Culture

I am convinced that it was the founding of the Centre for Faith and Culture, and its media arm Second Spring, in the early 1990s which is crucial to understanding Strat’s later life and work. In my view, the Centre, its activities and writings, were Strat’s living answer to a dismal prophecy made by the great German social scientist Max Weber just before his sudden death from Spanish flu in 1920. In a series of writings, Weber made what was then a radical prophecy: that capitalism would take over the world. He argued that this would happen both geographically, and within the fabric of nations. At the time, some critics argued that the recent Communist takeover in Russia proved Weber wrong in terms of his geographical argument; others suggested that the great independent civilizations of India and China had remained unchanged for thousands of years and would therefore prove immune to the attractions of capitalism. In my view, however, the modern triumph of globalization proves him right.

Weber also contended that capitalism would take over many of the functions carried out one hundred years ago by the family, the State, or non-commercial organisations such as churches or charities. There are many examples that illustrate how the world in which we live now is so radically different from what has come before as to validate Weber’s thesis. For example, families no longer look after aged grandparents but put them in commercial care homes, and many charities are no longer independent bodies but get money from the government to carry out carefully prescribed activities.

Such changes have not only influenced the way we live and work, but how we think. As Weber put it: “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world” (Science as a Vocation,  Max Weber 1918). What he meant by this was that the triumph of capitalism would lead to the modern society we know, where essentially everybody is encouraged to look for ways to make money; and also, as Chesterton wrote at the same time as Weber, to “the worship of the rich”. This process, Weber believed, would inevitably lead to the secularization of Western society. At the same time, the combination of individualism and growing scientific complexity would lead to the growth of a massive bureaucracy in all countries. This switch to a secular society where scientific understanding is prized and traditional beliefs ignored if not despised, contrasted with traditional societies, where, in Weber’s words, “the world remains a great enchanted garden”.  However, Weber simply could not see how this could be avoided. What he called the “iron cage of rationality” (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber, 1905) would become the dominant, if not the only way of thinking: religion, beauty, poetry, and so on would all drain from the world, leaving it a grey, dull, if highly efficient place, devoid of mystery. Society would also shift to an intense individualism as the social, family, and religious links that bind social life together wither away.

Various thinkers have tried to find ways to ‘re-enchant the world’, but without conspicuous success. Jung contended that myths recovered from the unconscious mind could re-establish the sense of wholeness to a disenchanted modernity. The political philosopher Ernest Gellner argued that as people could not endure living in such a disenchanted world, they became vulnerable to the attractions of various ‘re-enchantment creeds’ (as he called them) such as psychoanalysis, or Marxism.  In 2007 the Canadian scholar Charles Taylor produced The Secular Age, a substantial tome that examined in great detail how Weber’s secularization thesis has actually developed but did not attempt any programme to combat it.

Whilst I don’t know if Strat ever read Max Weber, I do believe that his work from the early 1990s was an answer to Weber’s point. Strat proposed a positive advocacy of the resacralization of society. As he put it in an article in Communio magazine in 1998:

The world must be given back [its] sacramental quality, its dimension of mystery. such a reorientation…would spell the final demise of mechanism as the paradigm of cosmic order.

In 2015 the CiRCE Institute posthumously awarded Strat the Paideia Prize “for lifetime contribution to classical education and the cultivation of wisdom and virtue”. Previous winners included the great Kentucky farmer-essayist, Wendell Berry (2012), and the distinguished theologian Peter J. Kreeft (2013). As a summing up of Strat’s working life devoted to faith and culture, this award seems no more than justified. But let me end with Stratford’s own words.

The word “culture” is often associated exclusively with the fine arts. We tend to use it in a broader sense—as the Pope himself does—to refer to social issues as well. “Culture” is everything that human beings do creatively through their work to transform or shape the world. That includes the attempt to overcome injustice. John Paul II, who speaks of a “culture of life”, has shown that Catholic Social Teaching is rooted in a kind of prophetic analysis of the underlying assumptions that shape our society and the way we live. We often don’t recognize that there are cultural and philosophical assumptions built into the way we spend our time, the way we work, the way we earn and invest and spend our money. What am I? What am I living for? What are my priorities? What is right and what is wrong? The way I choose to live reflects the answers I might give to such questions. So the connection between the social doctrine of the Church and the culture we inhabit and take for granted is very strong and close. The social doctrine of the Church is to a large extent a critique of the culture. (‘Trying to be Catholic: an interview with Stratford and Leonie Caldecott’, Catholic World Report January 2001)

Russell Sparkes is a Visiting Fellow at St Mary’s University where he lectures on Catholic Social Teaching. He is an authority on Cardinal Manning and the Distributists of the 1920s such as G.K Chesterton.

He is the author of numerous publications including G.K. Chesterton, Prophet of Orthodoxy (1996), Self-Help and the Voluntary Sector—what we can learn from the guilds(2010), and Cardinal Manning and the birth of Catholic Social Teaching (2012). He is currently writing a paper on Catholic Social Teaching and Healthcare, and carrying out research on how the Church’s social doctrine might inform an investment ethic.

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On the Unfairness of Life, Death, and Covid-19

By Edward Hadas

It’s Easter, for Christians a season of hope and a reminder of eternity, but in the here and now, it’s just not fair.

When we are not mourning, fretting, suffering, volunteering, or just getting on with our newly isolated lives, we are tempted to complain. Quarantines are not fair. The Covid-19 virus pandemic is not fair. Dying young is not fair. Death is not fair. All four of those complaints are justified, to different degrees and for different reasons.

Death is not fair

What did we do to deserve this? Ask Job. Ask Saint Paul. Ask Adam and Eve. Christians have a narrative of creation, sin, suffering and death, of redemption and life: in that order but also, somehow, overlapping. Theologians and philosophers add their wisdom and foolishness, but however deeply we think we understand God’s mercy and justice, there is here (as theologians like to say when faced with an impossible question) a great mystery.

We understand that death is inevitable, we may find life almost unbearable: and yet, we resist. We want life to go on. It’s not fair, this creeping certainty of the end of life as we know it. We are not built for separation from the living, or for the isolation of quarantine. We are created for and in communion with others. Even if I can be reconciled to my death, yours—you whom I love—your death is certainly not fair.

The current pandemic reinforces the enduring lament. I am not particularly relieved to hear that X percent of the Covid-19 victims were so frail or ill that they would have died in the next few months or years anyway. I resent and reject every removal from this life. The prematurity is irrelevant. The unpleasantness of old age and suffering is basically a trick to make death appear less opposed to our original, pre-Fall nature. You don’t have to be Dostoevsky to see through that ruse. Death is not fair.

Dying young is not fair

Not all the victims of this new virus were already on their way out. The random slaying of the otherwise well seems particularly unfair; like automobile accidents, which kill around 1.3 million mostly relatively young people each year (as I write, about 10 times the total Covid-19 count).

Yet, the thought that youth is the wrong time for death would have been almost incomprehensible only a century ago. Death was likely as soon as life started and remained a constant companion until… well, until death. High infant mortality was followed a few years later by high mortality in war and in childbirth. From birth onwards, incurable medical conditions, fatal accidents, vicious famines and various sorts of political and judicial cruelty steadily picked off young and old with indiscriminate fervour. No one ever had reason to feel safe from death.

In our current world, all that has changed. We call premature the death of anyone younger than 70, or even 80 years old. It is a remarkable modern accomplishment. Had our ancestors known what was coming, they might have justly complained: it is not fair that I live in the 14th or 19th century, before intubation, medical oxygen, antibiotics, vaccines and antiviral pharmaceuticals.

Nowadays, people live longer and healthier lives than at any previous time in history. So are the exceptions, the relatively few who do not die of the diseases of age, not fair? I think so, because the correct standard of fairness changes along with what is possible. The lack of electric power or of railroads was not unfair three centuries ago, and the lack of internet access was not unfair three decades ago. Now these deprivations are unnecessary and unjust.

Something similar is true of dying young. Much of it has become unfair, because much of it could have been prevented. Especially deaths at human hands, whether the cause is murderous commission or negligent omission.

After all, we moderns are keen on technological progress. We are very good at it. But we should and could do better. That inadequacy is not constant. It increases. The more we accomplish and the more we understand, the greater is the moral failure of not doing more and better. The world’s far too many poor people have a particularly just complaint about the lack of fairness. In a more just world, far fewer of them would die before their newly defined time.

The Covid-19 virus pandemic is not fair

A century ago, in 1918, the Spanish ‘flu killed something like 50 million people. That was roughly 2.5% of the world’s population and about seven times as many as died in all the battles of the First World War, which was coming to a climax as the pandemic spread. The influenza’s toll was certainly high, but it added only modestly to the unnatural unfairness of death itself. Humans were not entirely innocent victims, for they amplified the hecatomb with careless travel, especially the movement of troops; and with a cruel blockade of Germany that weakened the resistance to disease. For the most part, though, the influenza deaths were no more unfair than any acts of God. People could do little to prevent them, since there were no effective treatments and contagion was not well understood.

Thanks to modern innovations, far fewer people are likely to die from Covid-19 than from the Spanish flu. We can give the afflicted air to breathe and kill some of the pathogens which threaten their lives. The internet allows long and massive lockdowns and spreads best medical practices. The rapid developments of sophisticated tests, tracing tools and, God willing, vaccines may limit the virus’s spread.

Still, justice is not measured in crude numbers. The relatively few deaths from Covid-19 are more unfair than the vast number during the earlier pandemic. They could have done better, but not much better. We could have done much better. We could have prevented the disease from spreading in the first place.

Humans might never have caught it had the Chinese authorities used the best available technologies and supervision techniques to reduce the chances of contamination in the food chain. Economic development requires many choices, and the choice to give relatively low priority to public health was a bad one. The dire effects of that choice were magnified when the first cases arrived. For weeks, the Chinese authorities ignored or even repressed reports of an infectious agent that could threaten public health.

Nor are other governments blameless. The effective responses of South Korea and Taiwan offered models that could have been followed relatively easily in North America and Europe. Now many residents will die because of their leaders’ choice to ignore them. That is definitely not fair.

Quarantines are not fair

Even with the internet, no one wants to be locked in their homes for weeks or months. Still, if such quarantines are the only way to prevent large numbers of deaths, then they are fair enough. In that case, the unfairness comes earlier in the chain of causes, probably at the inactions which allowed the virus to spread. But perhaps this actually goes all the way back to the first human entry into the fallen state of death and suffering.

Still, quarantine? The word comes from 14th century Venice, but the practice of isolating the ill and possibly ill is far older. In the book of Leviticus, God commands the Hebrews to separate lepers from the rest of the community. The Covid-19 quarantine is particularly inefficient. Hundreds of millions of people are kept at home to keep some unknown fraction of them from spreading the disease. Medieval Venetian physicians would not understand electron microscopes and genetic sequencing, but they would be very comfortable with today’s measures of population restraint.

In an age when all things are forever being made new, the reversion to this tried but not terribly true, hugely inconvenient method suggests a failure of effort or imagination. Already, the experts are thinking of next time: automatic contact-tracing technologies, standardised development protocols to create tests, and massive manufacturing capacity to produce them. It is not fair to the many people who are under restraint now that this work was not done earlier.

It’s simply not fair

The millions of victims of modern history have had many reasons to complain that their lives, and especially their deaths, were not fair. Random slaughter for political and military reasons has never been fair, and there has been a great deal of it over the last century. For around half a century, every death from malnutrition or easily preventable disease has not been fair: because every one of them could have been prevented. By the numbers, the varieties of negligence related to Covid-19 are relatively trivial. Compared to the toll of political and economic actions and inactions in the 20th century, this virus may well cause very little death and suffering.

Still, the leaders who let this new disease spread, and who have no better way than universal quarantines to slow that spread, have certainly made life and death unnecessarily unfair. We have a duty of gratitude towards those who take care of the ill, and those who risk death just by doing their jobs. We also have a duty of indignation. Perhaps against death itself: but definitely against those who have allowed this mess to develop.

Edward Hadas is a Research Fellow of Blackfriar’s Hall, Oxford, and a regular contributor to Reuters Breakingviews, a financial commentary service. His book, Counsels of Imperfection: Thinking through Catholic Social Teaching, will be published by Catholic University of America Press later this year.

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If you’ve ever found shop-bought Advent calendars a little lacking, and want an easy way to be guided through the season with some spiritual reading and daily challenges to put your faith into action in the run-up to Christmas, you might like this simple Advent calendar DIY.

Simply copy the prompts, below, onto pieces of paper by hand, or copy and paste them into a file, print them off, cut them up, and roll them into little scrolls to hang with string from a branch of greenery, bannister, curtain pole, or anything you like. You could also keep it super simple and just print off or copy out our 24 prompts, below, as a straightforward list, stick it somewhere visible in your home. You can either use all 24 prompts or just the ones that fall inside Advent this year (since the length changes year to year). You can also add or adapt whichever prompts fall on the Sundays of Advent that year.

Either way, this is a lovely way to prepare for Christmas day-by-day throughout Advent, as an adult or together with children. Feel free to adapt the readings and action challenges, depending on your needs and capabilities.

And, if you’d like to do some extra reading with your children this season, make sure you don’t miss our two Christmas books, which make perfect reading during Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany.

First day of December

Read: Isaiah 2:2-5

Act: Write someone a card or letter to let them know you’re thinking of them.

Second day of December

Read: Isaiah 9:1-3

Act: Look out for all the beautiful things in the world around you today—at the end of the day, write down a list of the things you noticed, and thank God for them.

Third day of December, Feast of Saint Francis Xavier

Read: Isaiah 9:4-6

Act: Practise sharing today by giving someone something you wanted for yourself.

Fourth day of December, Feast of Saint John Damascene

Read: Isaiah 11:1-5

Act: Think of someone who needs special prayers, and go without something you like today. When you find yourself missing it, turn your thoughts to Jesus and pray for the person you chose.

Fifth day of December

Read: Isaiah 11:6-9

Act: Read the story of Saint Nicholas, and think about what you can learn from his life. Don’t forget to put out your shoes tonight, children!

Sixth day of December, Feast of Saint Nicholas

Read: Isaiah 26:8-9

Act: Go about your day looking out for little ways you can be more like Saint Nicholas, doing secret acts of kindness without seeking thanks or praise.

Seventh day of December, Feast of Saint Ambrose

Read: Isaiah 28:16-18

Act: Go out of your way to serve someone, or do extra chore at home, work, or school, today.

Eighth day of December

Read: John 1:1-9

Act: Welcome someone who might be lonely into your home by inviting them to a family meal with you this Advent and Christmas season.

Ninth day of December, Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Read: Luke 1:5-17

Act: Pray the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary today.

Tenth day of December

Read: Luke 1:18-25

Act: Spend some time with someone who needs it, today (ideas: sit with someone who looks lonely at lunch, invite someone to play with you at breaktime, visit an elderly neighbour.).

Eleventh day of December, Feast of Saint Damascus I

Read: Luke 1:26-38

Act: Give away one of your possessions without asking for anything in return.

Twelfth day of December, Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe

Read: Matthew 1:18-24

Act: Light a candle, if you have one, near a statue or picture of the Blessed Virgin Mary today, and spend some quiet time praying this prayer:

“Our Lady of Guadalupe, mystical rose, please pray for the Holy Church, protect the Pope, help all those who call to you, and since you are the ever Virgin Mary and Mother of God, ask your most holy Son to give us the grace of keeping our faith, which gives us sweet hope in the midst of the bitterness of life, burning charity, and the precious gift of perseverance to the end of our lives. Amen.”

Thirteenth day of December, Feast of Saint Lucy

Read: Luke 1:39-45

Act: Read the story of Saint Lucy’s life. What are some of the special ways she showed the world God’s love? Try to think of one small way you could imitate Saint Lucy in your own life, and practise it today.

Fourteenth day of December, Feast of Saint John of the Cross

Read: Luke 1:46-56

Act: Do something to help the homeless today (ideas: prayer, donating money or food to your local shelter, offering to buy a homeless person you pass a sandwich).

Fifteenth day of December

Read: Luke 1:57-66

Act: Call, or send a message to a family member or godparent you’re not in regular touch with today, to let them know you’re thinking of them and to find out how they are. Say a special prayer for them in your prayer time today.

Sixteenth day of December

Read: Luke 1:67-80

Act: Spend some time tidying your bedroom today, putting away toys and clutter that you usually leave out, and thanking God in your heart as you tidy for all the good things in your life.

Seventeenth day of December

Read: Mark 1:2-8

Act: Spend some time today thinking about your habits. What are the good habits in your life, and what are some habits that aren’t good for you and for others, that you might want to change? Choose one to start working on changing from this day forwards.

Eighteenth day of December

Read: Luke 3:1-6

Act: Talk and think about why we call God “Our Lord”, “Master”, and “King”. What kind of King is He? Write down some of the words the Bible uses to describe God (ideas: Just, Wise, Compassionate, Tender, Merciful, Father, Prince of Peace, Faithful, Saviour…).

Nineteenth day of December

Read: John 1:14-18

Act: Do something kind for a stranger today. (Ideas: give a stranger you pass on the street some flowers/a plant, bake some cookies and knock on some doors in your neighbourhood to offer them a treat, call your local home for the elderly and ask them if you could visit and bring some Christmas treats.)

Twentieth day of December

Read: John 1:19-28

Act: Go without eating chocolate (or another treat that you enjoy) today.

Twenty-first day of December

Read: Luke 2:1-5

Act: Copy this prayer out, stick it by your bed, try to
learn it off by heart, and practice saying it every morning when you wake up:

“Enlarge my heart, O Lord, that you can enter in.”

Twenty-second day of December

Read: Matthew 1:1-17

Act: Think about the people in your life that you’re grateful for, today. Make or buy some cards that you can send to friends and family after Christmas, to thank them for everything they did to help you have a lovely Christmas celebration this year.

Twenty-third day of December

Read: John 3:16-17

Act: Listen to the song, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”, and then spend some time in prayer, asking Jesus to be born anew in your heart this Christmas season.

Twenty-fourth day of December

Read: Luke 2:6-19

Act: Talk and think about what being patient means. Practice being patient and watching your words today—whenever you feel like whining or someone does something that annoys you, stop and say a quick prayer asking God to help you in that moment.

The post Make Your Own Advent Calendar appeared first on Second Spring.

The build up to Christmas is often such a busy and hectic time that we struggle to make space for the quiet reflection that Advent calls for in our own lives as adults, let alone in the lives of our children. That’s why we’ve been busy behind-the-scenes here at Second Spring working on two brand new beautiful Christmas books for kids that we hope will help you slow down and enter more deeply into the mystery of the Nativity with your little ones.

The Bethlehem Shepherds is the full colour storybook edition of the popular colouring book of the same title which we released last year, by writer and mother Madeleine Carroll, with lovely illustrations by Michelle Pitt. It’s been lovingly designed for children ages 3-8, telling the story of Christmas night through the experience of the shepherds and gently drawing parallels between the shepherds of Bethlehem and the Good Shepherd himself.

Here’s a little bit from the author, Madeleine, about where she got the idea for the book, and how she approaches the season of Advent with her family:

“I am a Catholic homeschooling mother to 5 children with another due next May. I myself was one of a family of six children in a busy and close home environment. I was homeschooled from age 6 up. As a teenager I loved traveling, before training as a Montessori teacher for 3-6 year olds, and then becoming a nanny and teacher to a homeschooling family with two young boys.

I love to walk over our local common and often jot down ideas for stories as I walk. This story came from my love of the Nativity story and the images that used to come to mind when I prayed the Third Joyful Mystery of the Rosary.

I really hope children and their parents will feel the joy and excitement I imagine the shepherds would have felt as soon as they heard about, and then found the Baby Jesus.

For each day of Advent we love to hang decorations on our Jesse tree, and also to read from a beautiful book by Ann Voskamp called Unwrapping the Greatest Gift.

Since I also love singing Christmas carols, I am trying to build a tradition where the children, my husband and I sing carols to our friends and neighbours and hand out chocolates. I have discovered that my 8 year old daughter is now learning lots of carols by heart and sings them around the house which is so nice.”

Sheba’s Journey is a charming story for children from 7-11 (though younger children will love the vibrant illustrations, too), telling the tale of a special camel who is chosen to carry valuable gifts to a mysterious king. Designed to unpack the mystery of the Epiphany story in Matthew 2:1-12, Sheba’s Journey charts the long journey of the Magi through the desert to reach the Holy Land, from Sheba the camel’s perspective.

This book has been many years in the making, and we’re so excited to finally be able to share it with you. Here’s some background from the illustrator, Susan Bateman:

“Ever since I was a child I have written and illustrated stories. I was an avid reader, supported by my parents—my Dad gave me Tom Sawyer to read at a young age, and always supplied me with endless paper and the best quality colouring pencils! And then life started in earnest and I studied to be a teacher, had kids, went back to teaching, when I fell in love with children’s books all over again.

Sheba’s Journey has been a huge learning curve for me, not least in terms of confidence, but there have been moments of such pure joy, that I would be thrilled if it can touch the heart of even just one child!

The idea of Sheba’s Journey is entirely Leonie’s. She has such a good sense of humour, and it seemed that the idea of a proud camel who thought she was the best and then discovered Jesus, and so learnt worship and humility (we hope!) always brought laughter. My hope is that through reading the stories together it would give parents the opportunity to talk with their children about what it feels like to be proud of yourself—important to believe in yourself, but it can go too far! And to also see the humility of Our Lord, Maker of the world, who chose to be born in such humble surroundings, and close to animals. I loved exploring the colours of the desert at different times of the day and night, and I learnt so much about camels.

Christmas for our family means a small house filled with lots of rapidly growing children, but the memories are so precious—the crib, and the candles, and the music—carols played on the piano and later the flute and cello), and the wonderful smells of the spices and the stuffings and the puddings and the cakes, and the joy of being together. When the children were old enough to attend Midnight Mass, we had to wait until they fell asleep before filling their stockings! Now they are grown up and some of them are married—we have a Polish Christmas Eve, with blessings and thanks to all our family and friends for what they have given us in terms of love and friendship; an English roast turkey on Christmas Day, a Boxing day walk after the St Stephen’s day Mass, followed by cold turkey and chips and peas! 

But before we get to Christmas Day, there is the ‘journey’, Advent, sometimes difficult, sometimes rewarding, but a precious time of reflection—candles, children playing with the crib, bringing the shepherds and the wise men and the animals to share in the Christmas story. And children love singing, and acting out the story, so seeing it from different perspectives is another way to encounter those hidden meanings.”

You can purchase both of these special books via our online shop. Find out about our latest deals here.

The post Beautiful Christmas Books for Kids appeared first on Second Spring.

By Stratford Caldecott († 17 July 2014)

Photograph © Dean Evans 2019

In the work of evangelization we rely to a very great extent on what is called “apologetics”, or the art of explaining and defending the faith. But apologists today have an uphill struggle. The reasons for this have been extensively analysed, and were well put, for example, in John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio [Faith and Reason]. The question is how the separation of Faith from Reason is to be bridged. Can it be done simply by what Pope Benedict calls “the broadening of reason”? I think not. There are two specific factors that need to be added to the picture, which we tend to forget. The first of these is the importance of the imagination. The second factor we tend to overlook, but which is absolutely crucial, is the distinction within Reason itself between two kinds of intelligence, which I will call conceptual and spiritual.

The French poet Paul Claudel once wrote: “The evil we have been suffering from for several centuries is less a split between Faith and Reason than between Faith and an Imagination become incapable of establishing an accord between the two parts of the universe, the visible and the invisible.” The imagination has a central role in the life of the soul, connecting the visible and the invisible. The new apologetics should not rely simply on philosophical arguments and the dry defense of doctrine. It must be “imaginative”. We should learn from Newman, Chesterton, and the Inklings.

The movement from Blake and Coleridge through the Pre-Raphaelites and Gothic Revival to the Catholic Literary Revival represents an attempt to recover the balance that had been lost in both Rationalism and in Romanticism. The Romantics were right, in a way, to reject the intellectual order of the Enlightenment because this was a false order and the rejection of the true Logos. The mistake lay further back, in the rejection of Scholastic wisdom, under the influence of Nominalism and Voluntarism a couple of centuries before the Renaissance. Thus the move from medievalist or pre-Raphaelite nostalgia to the recovery of a religious, indeed a Catholic, perspective was perfectly legitimate. And to the extent that today’s culture is largely an expression of Romanticism, it is legitimate for us to follow the path trodden by the Catholic Literary Revival in our own time, showing our contemporaries that the balance of truth and feeling, of life and intelligence, of imagination and wisdom, can be found only in a “return to religion”. 

The Romantic movement involved a discovery of the creative imagination in nature and in man. The English Romantics – Anglicans tending towards Catholicism – retained the emphasis on imagination but reintegrated this with the Logos, rejecting the Byronic tendency to glorify the passions without ordering the soul according to truth. A quick sketch of several of the key figures may help to flesh out this account.

Coleridge and Blake

Both William Blake (1757-1827) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) were exponents of the (capitalized) Imagination and influenced many of the Christian writers who came after. Blake, though hard at times to understand and in many ways a highly unorthodox Christian, was – as Chesterton was to write in his study of him – on the same side as Thomas Aquinas in a war which is “the noblest and most important effort in human history” (Chesterton, Blake, 183), namely the war of Christendom against the ethereal God of the Gnostics and Theosophists. Blake was a mystic but defended personality, creation, mercy, and resurrection – in other words, the “realism” of the Incarnation. For Blake, Jesus was the divine Imagination incarnate, and “the highest dogma of the spiritual is to affirm the material” (ibid, 135). He was a Christian Platonist, but one who saw that the God and spiritual realities are not less solid and definite than we are, but more so.

Blake was not merely a critic of Enlightenment rationalism, but in the name of these spiritual realities denounced it with all the fervour of an Old Testament prophet. He saw in it the violent, technocratic, utilitarian, hedonistic, consumerist, and spiritually empty “culture of death” that has been unfolding all around us ever since.

I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe
And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire,
Wash’s by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth
In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation: cruel Works
Of many wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which
Wheel within Wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony & peace.
(William Blake, “Jerusalem”)

It is partly this prophetic fervour which our contemporary apologists need to emulate. Apologetics is too tame, too dry. It needs, like John the Baptist, to summon people to repentance and reform of their lives – and to baptism. It can only do this by throwing a new light on things – by helping us to see the world and ourselves differently.

Blake worked as an engraver and painter, producing visionary images that are nearly always striking, if not startling. He also expressed his prophetic inspiration through a vast and obscure mythology. These mythological writings explore the triumph of human freedom and the liberation of human energies by means of the image of a cosmic war that rages from Eden through America and Albion (England) to the end of the world. In this respect, he was like Tolkien a century later, who also expressed his inspiration through a mythological epic that tried to capture a vast body of traditional wisdom – like Blake, to remind the modern world of something it was in grave danger of losing.

Coleridge was less fiery and more measured, more academic in his prose than Blake. He was open to European influences and a great admirer of German thinkers such as Kant. In the thirteenth chapter of his Biographia Literaria (1817), he creates a theoretical framework within which to understand the role of the Imagination, drawing a distinction between the “primary” and “secondary” imagination on the one hand, and what he called “fancy” on the other. The first of these, the primary imagination, is “the living power and prime agent of all human perception,” and “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” In other words, all perception is a creative act, akin to the divine. The secondary or poetic imagination only differs in degree and in mode from the primary: “It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; […] it struggles to idealize and to unify.” Fancy, by contrast, is “a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space,” in which the faculty of the will is able to rearrange the images of already perceived objects that have been retained by the memory. Fancy is more of a workhorse; the imagination in its two aspects a genuinely creative faculty.

It is to Coleridge that the later English Romantics owe the notion of the “symbol” as a vessel of meaning, perhaps an inexhaustible meaning. Here poetry came together with metaphysics, and a way was opened to appreciate nature herself as a book of symbols, as the ancient and medieval thinkers had seen her. I will return to this point later.

Newman

Blessed John Henry Newman (1801-1890), who was a young man of twenty-six when Blake died, is a more central figure in the story of apologetics, thanks to his overriding concern with the communication of faith in the modern world. As a master of “poetic prose” (arguably the greatest writer of English in the 19th century), he managed to bring intellectual argument together with poetic metaphor and symbol into the closest union, unlocking at the same time the spiritual depths of Holy Scripture, illuminating them with both Faith and Reason.

His theory of the Imagination may be found scattered through his works – especially The Grammar of Assent. As it was for Coleridge, the imagination is largely a synthetic or unifying power of the mind. Newman wrote no completely systematic account, but it is clear that he drew a distinction between “realizing” and “prehending” imagination. The former, realizing imagination, is merely the power of evoking a thing based on an impression it has left on the mind, within the memory. Prehending imagination is rather a synthetic power, a power of putting several such images or representations together into a single object or “idea” – a sophisticated example being the way we grasp the personality of Christ from the disparate impressions evoked in us by the Gospel accounts. It is this prehending imagination that recognizes the Christian faith as an “object” either to accept, or to reject. It is the prehending imagination that processes the intimations of conscience – our sense of natural justice, of nobility, of kindness, and so on – so that in them we grasp the voice of a divine Master, “living, personal, and sovereign” (Merrigan, Clear Heads and Holy Hearts, 81).

It should be clear from this how essential is the role of the imagination in apologetics. For Newman, “all beliefs – religious, secular and political – must first be credible to imagination” (ibid, 60). It is the imagination that enables us to relate to the object as a whole. Indeed it is the fact that the modern world assails the prehending imagination on every side, by drowning us in images and proposals, that makes the grasping of the Christian idea so very difficult. The apologist must, therefore, pay close attention to the impressions and experiences that are the data on which the prehending imagination acts. 

Newman also made a further distinction which comes into play in religious belief, namely that between the “notional” and “real” apprehension of an idea, to which corresponds the act of assent, also either notional or real; that is, given to a general or abstract idea (notional) or to one that is concrete and demanding of a more profound commitment of the personal self (real). “The heart is commonly reached,” he wrote, “not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us” (Newman, The Grammar of Assent).  “Real assent”, for example in the act of faith, is brought about by a supra-rational process called the “illative sense”, by which not just our reasoning mind but our whole person and all our human experience is brought into the act of judgment. 

One has only to turn to the narratives of Newman’s own life and conversion to see what it means in practice: grace working with reason and imagination in a man of integrity to bring about a courageous act of faith. In this way, our own hearts are touched.

Chesterton

Newman’s great successor as Christian apologist is G.K. Chesterton (1874-36), who was sixteen when Newman died, but lived most of his life in a very different era and was in many ways a complete contrast to the ascetic, fastidious, priestly Oratorian. Chesterton may have been just as holy as Newman, but dangerously overweight, a hard-drinking journalist, a man who loved public debate, and, of course, married rather than celibate. A heavy man who took himself lightly, his friendships, even with intellectual enemies such as the Socialist George Bernard Shaw, or the womanizing eugenicist H.G. Wells, are legendary.

Though he wrote no systematic philosophy of the imagination, he was one of the most imaginative writers in the English language, helping to inspire many later fantasy and fiction writers. His numerous apologetic works, no doubt partly influenced by Newman, reflected his profound insight – thanks to the “prehending imagination” – into the unity of Christian doctrines that on the surface appear to be opposed or paradoxical. In fact, his book Orthodoxy, written as an Anglican, is largely about this very discovery, and his later study, published in the year of his reception into the Catholic Church (1922), The Everlasting Man, applied it to a reading of world history.

From Chesterton, as from Newman before him and C.S. Lewis after, all of whom set themselves to defend Christian orthodoxy in a climate of growing skepticism if not hostility, we may draw certain lessons for a contemporary apologetics. Each were at their most effective when most personal and concrete. They were, of course, masters of English prose writing – which means that their style was precise and vivid, and alive in the sense of poetic; it evoked the common experiences of life, and none of their metaphors were dry. They all imbued their writing with a certain warmth or humour. In each case, it was not their more abstract descriptions of doctrine, but their accounts of their own conversion that had the most impact on others (Newman’s Apologia, Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and The Catholic Church and Conversion, and Lewis’s Mere Christianity and Surprised by Joy). This is not a matter of egoism, of putting the self at the centre of things, but of demonstrating the full impact and personal meaning of religious ideas in a way that enables us to see the demand they make upon the soul, and to begin to taste imaginatively the experience of faith. 

Chesterton wrote with infectious enthusiasm of the way in which his own prejudices against Christianity had been overcome, introducing The Catholic Church and Conversion as follows:

“The mark of the Faith is not tradition; it is conversion. It is the miracle by which men find truth in spite of tradition and often with the rending of all the roots of humanity. It is with the nature of this process that I propose to deal; and it is difficult to deal with it without introducing something of a personal element. My own is only a very trivial case but naturally it is the case I know best; and I shall be compelled in the pages that follow to take many illustrations from it.” (G.K. Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Conversion ch. 1)

The faith that the apologist seeks to defend, after all, is not a set of propositions, even though it can be codified in a Creed (which is a “symbol” of the faith). It is personal, indeed it is a Person, a Life. The Gospel is not four historical accounts of the words and deeds of an historical figure, but a single vision of salvation, calling to us to repent and change and walk towards a new light that has come into the world.

The Inklings

Finally, we come to the fellowship of writers known as the Oxford Inklings. The group included Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, Hugo Dyson, George Sayer, Roger Lancelyn Green, and others, but at the heart of it was the friendship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, who (in the last six years of Chesterton’s life, though they never met him) were drawn together, despite their different religious allegiances (Lewis was a Northern Irish Protestant, Tolkien a devout Roman Catholic), by a common love of mythology, folklore, epic poetry, and fairy-tales. They particularly loved what they called “Northernness”, by which they meant the atmosphere of the ancient tales of the Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians. 

And yet this fascination with old stories and vanished worlds, associated with a typical Romantic hatred of industrial modernity (Blake’s “cogs tyrannic”), was subsumed into their search for reality, since they regarded story and poetry as an instrument for discovering truth, and wrote such things themselves as a way of penetrating the surface of the world and seeing what it meant. They were interested in “escapist” literature, not in the sense that they wanted to escape from the world, but in the sense that they wanted to escape from prison (or from Plato’s “cave” perhaps). 

J.R.R. Tolkien, in his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” revised Coleridge’s account by making “fancy” together with the primary and secondary imagination into three degrees of one and the same imaginative faculty – the power of making and reading images. To this he added a fourth category, namely “art”: the power of composing a collection of images detached from the familiar or factual world and giving this “the inner consistency of reality”. Of course, to succeed in doing this, the writer must actually understand reality well enough to be able to reproduce its “inner consistency” in a work of fiction. The highest form of art, because the most creative, Tolkien thought, is fantasy, for it is in fantasy that man comes closest to becoming an image of God as the Creator of worlds.

Tolkien’s own major mythopoetic works, The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, drew on his primary-world experiences, for example at the Battle of the Somme in 1914, liberated these experiences from their factual or naturalistic elements, and re-expressed them within the framework of a fantasy epic that had in some recognizable way the “inner consistency” of reality. In this way, a “secondary world” was created as a vehicle for truths that could not be adequately captured by a factual or dryly abstract account. The meaning below the surface, obscured by complexity in factual accounts, could be made visible. This “meaning” concerned the very real drama of human freedom and temptation, the battle between good and evil, the nature of the virtues and vices, and the subtle workings of providence and grace. Such deep patterns and relationships, present but easily missed in the primary world, could be personified and demonstrated in a tale of heroism and magic in such a way that anyone who read the tale would be educated to notice and perceive them as operative in their own life. The story would function as an educational device, as well as an entertainment.

In fact, the entertainment value – the attraction that we feel to such stories – is almost entirely due, the Inklings realized, to the fact that we recognize something “true” in them. This was already well accounted for by Chesterton in Orthodoxy (1908) when he described the fairy-tales of his childhood as expressions of “common sense” – adding, “and I have not found any books so sensible since”. Readers of The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia go back to read them many times because doing so always feels like a return to sanity. In fact, for Lewis there was a further aim. This was to implant elements of Christian wisdom and Christian ideas without triggering the “fight or flight” response of the modern secular consciousness – “smuggling” them, so to speak, into the consciousness of the reader where they would help him to appreciate the meaning of the Christian story itself. (Thus Aslan represents Christ in a much more direct way than Frodo or Gandalf or Aragorn. For Tolkien’s taste, Lewis’s method veered too much towards the allegorical.)

Seeing the Invisible

Many other Romantic artists and poets tended to elevate feeling above intellect, poetry above philosophy, and nature above man or God, and in so doing lost their balance and eventually their hold on reality. The Christian Romantics of the Literary Revival heralded by Newman, by contrast, were intellectuals in search of the truth. They wanted the whole of reality, which could not be grasped simply through feeling, any more than it could be grasped by rational thought on its own. You might put it this way. In traditional Scholastic philosophy, Being is characterized by unity, truth, goodness, and beauty. The Romantics tended to subsume truth and goodness within beauty, believing that beauty alone could take them to their goal. Christian Romantics such as Newman and Lewis knew that beauty on its own could easily lead us astray. Beauty, Truth, and Goodness “coinhere”, they belong together, and if you separate them they will wither and die. 

These writers wanted truth. They were not merely indulging themselves. Through poetry, through images, through music, through beauty and through story they sought to reveal the presence of an invisible spiritual world in the visible. The current popularity of fantasy writing is partly their legacy – and especially that of Lewis and Tolkien. They awoke in our culture a hunger for the meaning and truth that are to be found in history, in drama, in heroism – living images which reveal glimpses of a higher reality, a spiritual reality that walks among us in the light of day. As I indicated, they encouraged a renewed appreciation of the importance of symbolism as a way of communicating truth. This has a direct bearing on the challenge of developing a new apologetics. It is not that the modern apologist should be a writer of poetry or fantasy literature, but that he or she should find a way to educate a new generation in the meaning and power of symbols as a vehicle of metaphysical and doctrinal truth.

In Sources of the Self (379) the Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor writes that “The symbol, unlike allegory, provides the form of language in which something, otherwise beyond our reach, can become visible.” Symbols, as understood by these writers, are not mere road-signs pointing to something distant and removed, but “bridges” connecting and joining one thing to another, making something present that would otherwise be absent. The “symbol” as understood by Romanticism enables an interpenetration of matter and form: once Christianized, this implies a new way of understanding the complementarity of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, for the symbol becomes the manifestation in matter of a particular form or idea. 

If each and every created thing is seen as a manifestation of its own interior essence, the whole world becomes a book of symbols to be read by “those who have eyes”. The very existence of created things is symbolic because an intentional act on the part of God who thereby expresses himself in the creature. Thanks to the grace of the Incarnation, the hypostatic union of divine and human natures in the one Person of Christ, this natural language is transformed into the vehicle of a real presence of God within his creation.

In order to develop an effective apologetics, we need to learn from Coleridge, Blake, Newman, Chesterton, and the Inklings, and find a way of valuing the imagination without denigrating intellect and reason. For in fact the spiritual imagination is the very “heart” of man. The imaginative faculty mediates between the sensory and the intellectual world in its own way just as the reasoning faculty does. But like all mediators it is ambiguous. It has two sides or faces. When it faces “upwards” towards the Source of reality it is capable of mediating and transmitting truth, as it does in the true visions received by prophets, and also in the works of the great artists and poets. In such cases, the “matter” that it receives from the senses and holds in the memory is transformed and raised up into a symbolic form, translucent to the higher world. But when the imagination is turned downwards, towards hell rather than heaven, it can dissolve and obstruct our perception of truth, leading us away from a world of order into a desolate and chaotic landscape of shadows. Some of the less uplifting products of the surrealist and expressionist movements in art might provide examples of this. Fantasy that is oriented in this direction leaves the soul feeling bereft, melancholy, or even unclean. An example would be pornographic images, which focus the mind on the human body as such, excluding any consideration of the spiritual dimension or the person as a whole. 

Implicit in what I have been saying is a theory of askesis or spiritual purification, according to which human desire must be progressively redirected. From facing downward it must be turned towards the light, the only direction in which human fulfilment is possible. This is not the same as trying to escape the body, as if it were an evil trap. On the contrary, our bodies must be raised up to the level of spirit – in token of which both Christ and his Mother were assumed into heaven. The purpose of the symbolic creation is to incarnate the Invisible. Yet the goal of the Incarnation is for the material cosmos to be assumed by the God who transcends it.

The Christian Romantics saw that we cannot believe without imagining. Christianity is no longer merely disbelieved. It has become virtually unimaginable. Increasingly we live in a world of words and images manipulated by technology, cut off from the rhythms and textures of nature, and our religion has become a superficial affair of propositional beliefs and rules of behaviour. Such a religion cannot be affirmed with what Newman would call a “real assent”; it cannot be grasped by the prehending imagination as an integral whole. An apologist seeking to draw people to faith must find a way to activate the synthetic power of the Imagination, so that what is thought and judged to be credible can also be “understood” as a Word addressed to each of us personally, demanding that we change our lives and become other than we are. Only love can ask this of us, and so the purpose of apologetics is to awaken and reveal love.

To paraphrase Aidan Nichols OP in his book Christendom Awake, people today find Christianity not just unbelievable, but unimaginable – and, I would add, uninteresting. And in the words of Andrew Davison:

“The Christian faith does not simply, or even mainly, propose a few additional facts about the world. Rather, belief in the Christian God invites a new way to understand everything.… In this book we celebrate reason, but not so as to make apologetics rational in some cold or arid fashion. Apologetics should be a matter of wonder and desire, not least because reason at its most reasonable is itself a matter of wonder and desire.” (Imaginative Apologetics)

The new apologetics must indeed be concerned with reasonableness, but mainly with the “reasons of the heart” (Pascal); it must address itself to the intelligence, but more so to the entire soul, addressing a call to the human spirit that awakens wonder and desire, because it speaks of an infinite good that we had almost forgotten how to long for.

Beyond Imagination: Intellectus

I have been speaking about the role of the imagination in helping to bridge the gap between faith and reason discussed in John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio. But in addition to the imagination, a second factor must be taken into account – a distinction not just between Faith and Reason but between two kinds of “Reason”. 

Such a distinction runs through the Christian tradition from St Paul (1 Thess. 5:23) to St Teresa of Avila, with her notion of the “soul of the soul” and the “interior castle”. Before the advent of mind-body dualism at the time of the Enlightenment, the human personality was generally seen as tripartite or existing on three levels, not just two: body, mind, and spirit, or in Greek soma (hyle), psyche (dianoia), and pneuma (nous), or in Latin corpus, anima, and intellectus (spiritus) (cf. Pieper, 11-12). The third element in the human being, which I will call “Intellect” (rather than Reason), is the essence of that unity of body and soul to which Christianity gave the name “person” – it is in a sense the faculty of love, the face or heart that we turn towards God, the deepest part of ourselves where nature is open to grace, where God breathes life into man. It is the seat of a form of knowing that comes from love, or from a deep union with that which is known.

Nature, Grace, and Spirit

In the first part of de Lubac’s article he establishes that St Paul’s references to this anthropology have deep roots in Scripture as well as in human experience.  They were not simply imported from an alien Greek philosophy (de Lubac notes the existence of “Plato phobia” among many Christian scholars, especially in the modern period).  But the term for “spirit” (pneuma) remains deliberately ambiguous in Paul.  On the one hand it may refer to the Holy Spirit or divine life implanted in man by baptism; on the other, it may refer to a part of man, and specifically to that “breath of life” which God breathed into his nostrils at the very beginning (Gen. 2:7). It becomes clear as he proceeds that we are talking of the “highest point of the soul”, and that the ambiguity in question is precisely due to the paradoxical relationship of nature to grace in our human destiny.  We are created to share in the life of God, but we are not compelled to do so: we can attain that life only through the exercise of freedom.

De Lubac sees the tripartite tradition continuing without interruption right through the early Scholastic period. In St Thomas, the distinction takes a slightly different form: that between action and contemplation, or the moral and the mystical life, or ratio and intellectus. It re-emerges fully in the Renaissance with Nicholas of Cusa and Ficino. Despite the triumph of the new Cartesian dualism in the universities, the authentic Christian tradition shines through in a continuous chain of authors up to and beyond Paul Claudel (who speaks of “this sacred point in us that says Pater noster”). How could it not, when the experience of every spiritual master confirms the existence in us of a place where we encounter God – the spirit, or “soul of the soul”? 

A Framework for Apologetics

Taking these two extra factors into account, we can try to outline a theory of apologetics – or of the kind of apologetics we need for the New Evangelization – along the following lines:

  Intellect
   |
Reason –––    ––– Faith
   |
  Imagination

What this diagram signifies is that it is no longer (if it ever was) case of relying on just Faith and Reason. Both of these need Imagination as their support and they need intellectual energy from above to lift them up. They come together only in the kind of contemplative knowing that transcends mere mental activity (such as the weighing of opinions). They need support not only from below but also from above. 

The problem is that this generation has been raised to doubt Reason as well as Faith. So without some assurance that there is a higher kind of knowledge to which Faith and Reason together can take us, the invitation to ride on the “two wings” of Faith and Reason is likely to be refused. Faith can enable us to hold onto the Church’s teaching without needing fully to understand it. Reason can demonstrate the logical consistency of our doctrines, but it cannot show us a vision of truth. In order to see all these things to be beautiful and therefore worthy of belief, we need Newman’s “prehending imagination”, which grasps the faith as an integral whole. And we need enough imagination in the ordinary sense of the word to appreciate that poetry and mythology and historical narrative are different genres which communicate truth in different ways, often indirectly and obscurely through analogy and allegory. We also need the spiritual intellect, intellectus, which enables us to read a metaphysical truth in those narrative accounts and poems. The Bible is embedded in a cultural and spiritual tradition of interpretation, which is based on faith and reason, imagination and intellect, all working in harmony.

I will look at three main applications of this principle, to help us in developing an apologetics suitable for today’s evangelization: the way of beauty, the way of religious dialogue, and the way of testimony.

In recent years it has become widely accepted in Church circles that modern men and women, especially the young, can be more effectively reached through a beauty that moves their hearts than through intellectual dogmas and expositions of the faith, no matter how well presented. Imagination has come well and truly to centre stage, as far as apologetics is concerned, and there are several programmes of catechesis and introductions to faith that focus on great works of art. The Pontifical Council for Culture dedicated a Plenary Assembly to the theme in 2006 and produced a Concluding Document entitled “The Via Pulchritudinis”, which includes these words:

“[The] Way of Beauty seems to be a privileged itinerary to get in touch with many of those who face great difficulties in receiving the Church’s teachings, particularly regarding morals. Too often in recent years, the truth has been instrumentalized by ideologies, and the good horizontalized into a merely social act as though charity towards neighbour alone sufficed without being rooted in love of God…. Beginning with the simple experience of the marvel-arousing meeting with beauty, the via pulchritudinis can open the pathway for the search for God, and disposes the heart and spirit to meet Christ, who is the Beauty of Holiness Incarnate, offered by God to men for their salvation.”

In a way, this is a return to Plato, and his insight into the power of eros, or what Pope Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est (2005) calls “ascending love”. Beauty is the radiance of truth, which has the power to attract us and move the will. Undoubtedly it is marked by the Fall and to some extent distorted by sin, which fragments the human soul in such a way that we are drawn towards many partial images of truth. The desire for beauty is not an infallible path to truth in its integrity. Nevertheless, the beauty that we see in creation, in the arts, in the liturgy, and above all in holiness (spiritual beauty) can lead us in the direction of truth and goodness.

The Pontifical Council makes sure to note the intrinsic connection between the Way of Beauty – the way of Imagination – and the way of intellectus, using Pope John Paul’s encyclical on philosophy to make the point.

“[The] metaphysician is needed to help us understand why beauty is a royal way leading to God. In suggesting to us who He is, it stimulates in us a desire to enjoy the peace of contemplation, not only because He alone can fill our minds and hearts, but because He contains in Himself the perfection of being, a harmonious and inexhaustible source of clarity and light. To reach it, we need to know how to make the passage from phenomenon to foundation: ‘Wherever men and women discover a call to the absolute and transcendent, the metaphysical dimension of reality opens up before them: in truth, in beauty, in moral values, in other persons, in being itself, in God. We face a great challenge at the end of this millennium to move from phenomenon to foundation, a step as necessary as it is urgent. We cannot stop short at experience alone; even if experience does reveal the human being’s interiority and spirituality, speculative thinking must penetrate to the spiritual core and the ground from which it rises.'”

It is not experience alone, even the experience of beauty, that conducts us to God. Images can speak of God, but they need to be understood, and for that we need not just an ability to think but a spiritual intelligence open to revelation from above.

Something similar can be said of that other great arena of apologetics, the encounter of different religious traditions. The apparent contradictions, both imaginative and intellectual, between the spiritual traditions of mankind seem to provide an insuperable argument for relativism. At the level of the rational intelligence, it is apparent they cannot all be right. So either they are all false, or one of them is right and the rest wrong. Rationalist apologetics draws the latter conclusion. But this leaves something important out of account, which is the sense we cannot quite extinguish that such great traditions – the source of so many civilizations – cannot be entirely or even largely the work of the devil. 

The topic cannot be dealt with in a small space, but it seems to me that a sensitivity to the symbolic languages in which these religions express themselves – imagination illuminated by intellectus – reveals many interesting parallels and points of convergence, but it also highlights one fundamental difference that marks out Christianity from all the others: namely the doctrine of the hypostatic union of God and man in Christ. This suggests that the new apologetics needs to adopt a new approach to inter-religious dialogue, in which the Christian apologist gives more credence and respect to other religions than hitherto, while at the same time achieving a new clarity with regard to the unique position of Christ – as not just one of the prophets and saints, however distinguished, but marking a new start for all mankind, a “new Adam”. Presenting the faith in this way would highlight the novelty that makes Christianity worthy of attention among the religious traditions of mankind.

Conclusion: The Way of Testimony

The purpose of apologetics is not just to get more people into the churches on a Sunday. It is to help us rise from the ground level of our animal nature to a higher spiritual plane, and eventually to come face-to-face with God in true knowledge – knowledge that is identical with love. This is not a Gnostic ascent (meaning an ascent that seeks to escape our embodied nature altogether in pure knowledge), since in rising we bring that animal nature along with us. And, of course, in this process we are not entirely passive. It is our own actions, our own will, our “hearts”, that are raised up to God, and that cannot be done without our own active cooperation, as Jesus himself shows us by praying in the Garden of Olives to make his own (human) will accord with the divine will: “Not my will but yours be done…” (Luke 22:42)

Apologetics must be poetic and mystical as well as rational, if it is to move souls. It must speak to the whole person: body, mind, and spirit. We must not accept the “narrowing of Reason” to scientific rationality alone. But no more should we accept the narrowing of the human person to the two faculties of thought and will, leaving us trapped between the need to prove something beyond doubt, and the need to take a leap into the darkness. 

That is why I think the most important method of apologetics today is the way of personal testimony, or witness. The other methods are complementary to this, but will fail without it. Avery Cardinal Dulles argued this in an important article in First Things on “The Rebirth of Apologetics”, taking his lead from the “personalism” of Pope John Paul II:

“Personalism, he believes, is the best medicine for awakening the world from its metaphysical slumber. He begins his arguments for the existence of God by reflecting not on the finitude, mutability, contingency, and order of the universe, as was traditionally done, but on the aspirations of the human heart for communion with the divine. In his view human beings are made for transcendent truth, and such truth turns out to be a person who says of himself, ‘I am the truth.’ The Church is a place in which human persons enter into communion with one another in Jesus Christ. The Pope thus presents an intersubjective or interpersonal version of Christianity that can be a very attractive alternative to readers who suffer from the anonymity of contemporary collectivism or the isolation of contemporary individualism.”

The world is looking, he says, not so much for arguments as for witnesses – and that is exactly what we would expect from the theory of apologetics I have advanced above. A person is persuaded to adopt a point of view, or brought to recognize a truth, in many ways, but it seems that the greater and more far-reaching the truth, the more it requires all our human faculties to be engaged. A man has intellect and imagination, reason, will, and emotion, and all of these are engaged in making and sustaining an act of faith that will determine the course and direction of his life. 

It is often said that the great evangelizers are the saints, and that without examples of sanctity evangelization would fail. “The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church.” A truth worthy of man can best be expressed not as a set of propositions but as a life, an example, a testimony that shows that it can be lived, and that living it brings peace, joy, and fulfillment. Reason needs argument, and faith needs encouragement, but imagination needs an example, and intellect needs to receive the image of God. 

St Irenaeus tells us in Adversus Haereses (IV, 20, 7), “The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God. If the revelation of God through creation already brings life to all living beings on the earth, how much more will the manifestation of the Father by the Word bring life to those who see God.” The truth of Christianity is Christ, a “man fully alive”, and the best way to communicate that truth, and to arouse a love for it, is for a person to live in such a way that the life and light of Christ is evident in him, so that it shines before men and draws them towards the vision of God.

This essay was edited from several versions composed by Stratford in late 2011 (around the time he was diagnosed with terminal cancer) as part of a consulting project commissioned by Universidad CEU San Pablo in Madrid on Imaginative Apologetics in the English tradition.

Stratford Caldecott, taken by his daughter Rose-Marie Caldecott 2012

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An Interview with Academic Tutor Dr Rebekah Lamb

Photograph © EIBN Photography 2019

Dr Lamb, you came on the first Thomas More College/Second Spring Oxford Summer School, back in 2008. Can you describe what it was like? The Second Spring Summer School was in its pilot year when I attended it. I had just finished my BA in Humanities and Literature at the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts and was preparing to begin my Masters in English Literature back home in Canada at the University of Western Ontario. The program was nothing short of transformative: it opened up to me an in-depth examination of the Catholic faith in the Victorian period, an examination that went beyond cliched and generic discussions, showing—with rigour and range—how Catholicism and the Christian intellectual tradition, especially medieval art and culture, influenced the development of the arts, in a variety of forms (from painting through to architecture, poetry and the novel), throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. This encounter with the pivotal roles that figures such as Newman, Hopkins, Waugh, Tolkien and others played in the development of literary and aesthetic culture in the modern period, broadly speaking, ended up profoundly influencing the direction of my doctoral work. To this day, it continues to inform my work as an academic specialising in Victorian and Modernist poetry, art, and the intersection between theological concerns and aesthetic forms. In addition to the intellectual formation, the Summer School provided me with the opportunity to see what a holistic education might look like. The leaders of the programme (Stratford and Léonie Caldecott) had not only thought deeply about the relationship between theology, the arts, and culture: they clearly lived out an engaged relationship with the very cultural currents they studied. The Summer School was memorable for the lectures, but also for its opportunities for prayer, conversation, and interactions with various key sites related to our studies: Stonor Manor (frequented by St Edmund Campion), C.S. Lewis’s home the Kilns, the Oxford Oratory, Littlemore, White Horse Hill, and the list continues. To this day, I have lasting friendships with those who participated in, and who taught, this programme. So it’s a great privilege to contribute to the programme’s development this summer.

Did the Summer School in any way influence the direction you took later in your graduate studies or academic career? What I studied at the Summer School profoundly influenced the direction of my graduate studies and, eventually, my doctorate. Now, it continues to do so in my academic career. For instance, my first book centres on the influence of Pre-Raphaelite and Catholic aesthetics on emerging modern concepts of value in everyday life. In particular, I look at how Victorian medieval revivalisms served as redressive resources for concerns regarding secularism and affects of discontent, like boredom, that were distinctly on the rise (for a host of reasons) throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. The ideas for this project emerged, in part, from ideas that began percolating during my time in Oxford back in 2008. The Summer School has also greatly shaped the way in which I organise and develop my teaching and program of research to this day, here at the University of St Andrews. I’m keen to impart to my students that the questions of perennial significance grow out of our shared concerns about existence, the purpose of life, and the role that Christianity has played in informing these concerns. For example, I’m co-developing a proposed undergraduate module here at St Andrews that examines how the imagination plays a vital role in informing our most pressing questions about culture, religion’s role within it, and the relationship between science and faith as modes of knowledge. Our proposed readings range from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Unbound to scholarship on New Physics, with Augustine, Dante, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and other works in between. The kind of scope and range of this module’s approach was found and modelled in an exceptional way in both my undergraduate formation at the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts and at the Second Spring Summer School.

Are there any particular memories of Stratford that you would like to share? I am fortunate to have a fair number of memories of Stratford and his family throughout my time at the Summer School and in subsequent years. There are some impressions I would like to share, that grew out of a series of encounters, and then one specific memory I’d like to mention. First, some impressions (and these are impressions about Strat and Léonie because it’s pretty difficult to talk about one without bringing up the other). I was struck by how Strat and Léonie worked as a team that deeply believed in the resources Second Spring could offer to Catholic culture within the UK and in the anglophone world. Their work grew out of their shared faith and deep care for the way culture grows out of a lived and living relationship with the Christian intellectual and spiritual tradition. This was not only evident in the ways they taught. It infused the whole rhythm of the Summer School. I left the Summer School feeling as though I had made special, personal friendships that would shape me in future years, and they certainly have. Now for a particular memory of Strat. He provided me with my first chance to teach, in a sustained way, some of the more developed research I was working on, in the early period of my graduate studies, back in the summer of 2011. I was participating in a conference in London, and incorporated a short stay in Oxford to visit some friends (the Caldecott’s eldest daughter Tessa among them). It happened to be during the time of the annual Summer School and Strat generously invited me to run a seminar, during which I discussed the relationship between medieval aesthetics and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry. Getting to teach in one of the places Hopkins loved best, in a programme that had meant so much to me, and in collaboration with a scholar I admired greatly was a very special experience and I am so grateful for the way Strat encouraged my academic work as something vocational and avocational.

Do you think that Second Spring, the journal and the Summer School, has a distinctive charism, and if so are you able to define this? Second Spring is engaging with the current culture, both in its own right and in relation to our rich and complicated Catholic intellectual and cultural tradition. It does this in a way that is timely, person-centred, and academically rigorous as well as accessible to people from a variety of backgrounds. This is a rare but absolutely essential approach if we are going to reach out, and attend, to the very pressing, real needs of so many aspects of our culture—be it the need to rediscover the resource that faith is for the arts or the ways in which prayer aides like Magnificat (which Léonie still edits for the UK and Ireland), or journals and websites like Second Spring can help us better incorporate rhythms of prayer into our daily lives. This charism can help us learn and live out our faith with, as Ratzinger once put it, both our heart and our reason “open to God”.

Tell us more about your current post at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and how you got there. As of this summer, I joined the School of Divinity at the University of St Andrews. As Lecturer in Theology and the Arts within the School’s Institute of Theology, Imagination and the Arts (ITIA), I teach undergraduate and postgraduate modules on various intersections between theology and the arts and assist in co-ordinating a variety of initiatives—such as our Institute’s weekly Research Seminar Series, where leading scholars from across the UK and beyond come to share their research on aspects of the growing field of Theology and the Arts. Given ITIA’s status as among the first and premier places in the world for advancing innovative, serious and also public-facing research on interfaces between Theology and the Arts, I had been following the Institute for some time and found its aims and outputs influential on the way I envisioned my own research and teaching trajectories. When the chance came to apply for a Lectureship at ITIA in the Winter of 2018, I applied and was delighted to receive the position shortly thereafter.

What are your current research interests, and what brought you to them? I specialise in the art and writings of the Pre-Raphaelites and their affiliate circles, including Christina Rossetti and fin de siècle authors and artists, such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, as well as their Modernist inheritors, particularly G.K. Chesterton and Evelyn Waugh. I am interested in how theology forms and is informed by art and literature; the phenomenon of the growing rise of boredom and other affects of discontent, from the Victorian period through to today; intersections between liturgical theology and Christian Personalism; and the currents of devotional art and fiction in Canada from the 1920’s to the present, especially as found in the work of Catherine Doherty, William Kurelek, and Michael O’Brien. As briefly mentioned above, I’m finishing a book on the theological and aesthetic implications of boredom throughout the Victorian period and into the early twentieth century. Entitled Suspended in Time: Boredom and Other Discontents in the Pre-Raphaelites and their Circle, the book is planned for release in 2020 with McGill-Queen’s University Press. Among other projects, I am currently contributing to Palgrave’s Encyclopedia of Victorian Women Writers, covering Victorian Anglo-Catholic women’s poetry and prose and this Spring I will be speaking on C.S. Lewis and forms of belief at the McGrath Institute of Church Life’s Lenten Lecture Series at the University of Notre Dame. As time permits, I also occasionally write for The Catholic Herald (UK) and Convivium: Faith in Our Common Life (Ottawa, Canada).

You taught extensively for us in 2014, the year Stratford died, and this year you are overseeing the whole Summer School. Can you describe what teaching means to you? As a teacher I hope to impart to my students how the study and practice of literature and the arts, in dialogue with theology and biblical studies, enables them to more fully engage with what it means to be human, in the world, and called to do worthwhile things with their lives (for both themselves and for others). I think the following points from Stratford’s Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education, sum up well what teaching means to me. He notes that education, grounded in the “transcendent horizons” available to us, enriches a student’s sense of the “meaning of and purpose of life” and in so doing “releases the floodgates of human creativity” which, in turn, serves as a resource for culture.

Rebekah Lamb at William Morris’ house during the 2014 Second Spring Summer School

Learn more about Second Spring’s Oxford Summer School here. The programme will next run in 2021—sign up to hear news.

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By Rev. Jacob A. Strand

During my first parish assignment in my home Archdiocese of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, much of my priestly ministry transpired in school as well as in church. Teaching the elementary school students and ministering the sacraments were two of my principal responsibilities. They also were experiences that disclosed a regrettable truth. Neither education nor the sacramental liturgy captured parishioners’ minds and hearts: more often than not, both these experiences bored them. T. S. Eliot’s lamentation—“We had the experience but missed the meaning” (Four Quartets)—was often on my mind.

For three years, I looked for the cause of this disconnection with meaning. One day, I unexpectedly received some welcome direction. While paging through a Catholic newspaper, I noticed the obituary of a man whose name I recognized: for I had read several of his articles. His name was Stratford Caldecott, and he was only 60 years old. Reading the praiseworthy words of remembrance inspired me to purchase a few of Caldecott’s books and return to several of his articles. It was immediately clear that this man shared my concern about the malaise that so depressed the Western world. Furthermore, many of his writings concerned education and sacramental-liturgical mystagogy. What I found in Caldecott was both a penetrating diagnosis and a hopeful remedy.

While they may seem distant from one another, liberal arts education and lifelong Christian initiation both share a deep rapport. A meaningful education facilitates a meaningful exploration of the sacraments and liturgy. By removing one set of blinders, Caldecott not only restores one’s vision of poetry, mathematics, ecology, and science, but also holy water, blessed oil, spoken prayers, Eucharistic processions, and genuflections, to take a few examples. Everyone shares the blind beggar’s desire—“I want to see” (Mk 10:51). Relearning to see the power of words, the importance of actions, and the radiance of the created order through an integral and meaningful education frees Catholics to explore the signs and symbols that communicate the saving mysteries of faith.

Championing the essential role of education in human development, Caldecott claims, “Education is our path to true humanity and wisdom” (Beauty for Truth’s Sake, 12). And he specifies that walking this path requires “the ability to find meaning” (‘Towards a Distinctively Catholic School’). Unfortunately, education often fails to realize this lofty purpose. “Contemporary education,” Caldecott observes, “tends toward the elimination of meaning—except in the sense of a meaning that we impose by force upon the world” (BFTS, 18). He attends to various symptoms of this educational crisis, including education’s reductive exploitation for economic and social purposes, made possible by educational fragmentation. And he diagnoses these symptoms as rooted in modern philosophy. “The via moderna of the nominalist philosophers from the 14th century onwards”, writes Caldecott, “undermined natural theology and metaphysics.” By slicing off this philosophical patrimony, nominalism (and its twin-sister voluntarism) provoked a reductive subjectivism, manifested predominantly by rationalism, scientism, and unhinged romanticism. The educational influence of such philosophical tendencies fragments curricula, encourages shortsighted educational goals, and ultimately obscures students’ perception of the inherent relationality and meaningfulness of creation.

If Caldecott’s reader is looking for novel tips to quickly fix the educational crisis, he will be disappointed. Opting out of modern educational battles, Caldecott appeals for the recovery of a traditional philosophical approach. Whereas modernity evacuates reality of intrinsic meaning and subsequently reduces meaning to exclusive subjectivity, ancient Greek philosophy assimilated by Christianity locates meaning within the created order, as given by the Creator and manifested by the “keys to meaning”.

“The keys to meaning are…form, Gestalt, beauty, interiority, relationship, radiance, and purpose. An education for meaning would therefore begin with an education in the perception of form. The ‘re-enchantment’ of education would open our eyes to the meaning and beauty of the cosmos.” (BFTS, 18; Beauty in the Word, 117)

Among the various keys that unlock the meaning of creation, a few stand out in Caldecott’s oeuvre: namely, relationality, the transcendentals, logos, and triune unity-in-diversity. To overcome the philosophical reductions implicit to contemporary education, Caldecott calls for a renewed appreciation for the metaphysical contours of creation.

Given the weightiness of this metaphysical approach, where can educators look to discover an educational method capable of doing the heavy lifting? Caldecott gestures to the liberal arts tradition, specifically the trivium and quadrivium, as it was assimilated into the Christian Western world. Here, he discovers the resources for reviving an “education for meaning”. Ever a realist, Caldecott does not seek to replicate the ancient and medieval educational arrangement, but rather “to derive inspiration from the liberal arts” through “a creative retrieval and development” (BITW, 10; ‘The Search for Wisdom in Education’). Exhibiting such a creative development, he argues that the trivium of rhetoric, dialectic, and grammar form the fundamental anthropological skills of remembering, thinking, and acting. He also amplifies the quadrivium, demonstrating how these arts teach students to find the meaning manifested by the beautiful form of the cosmos. Throughout his retrieval of the trivium and quadrivium in Beauty in the Word and Beauty for Truth’s Sake, Caldecott uncovers the metaphysical foundation of the liberal arts tradition. This reintegrates education by elucidating the often-overlooked connections between various academic subjects. Furthermore, it restores the intelligence of the heart, poetic imagination, and metaphysical perspective, thus freeing students to grow in wisdom by exploring the meaning communicated through words, actions, and aspects of the cosmos.

By uncovering the metaphysical thrust of the trivium and quadrivium, Caldecott shows how the liberal arts tradition contains wisdom for confronting our educational crisis, and offers an education for meaning. But Caldecott goes further. He also shows how the right education helps one see the relevance of the liturgy and sacraments. For example, by highlighting the common integration sought by both education and liturgy, he argues the former culminates in the latter. One could also argue that, by evoking the sacramentality of the created order, Caldecott’s educational renewal further accentuates the relevance of the sacraments. Such arguments are geared primarily towards the evangelization of those—both secular and Christian—who struggle to believe in the sacramental economy.

Without disregarding the importance of confronting modern skepticism, I would like to propose another argument that primarily targets those well-intended Catholics who struggle, not with faith, but with curiosity; not with the ability to assent, but with the desire to explore. The truth is that many fully initiated, faithful Catholics are bored by the formal celebration of the sacraments and liturgy. For such people, a deeper penetration of the sacramental liturgy, while by no means necessary for salvation, would yield a greater appreciation for the Church’s prayer. While this would benefit all Catholics, it would particularly help those living in places where cultural Catholicism is long gone. As such, it seems pertinent to ask, “Does the liberal arts’ recovery of a metaphysical perspective on the meaning inherent to language, action, and the cosmos further benefit a Catholic’s mystagogical exploration of the meaning communicated through the signs and symbols that comprise the celebration of the sacramental liturgy?”

To begin searching for an answer within Caldecott’s writings, it is helpful to consider his explanation of mystagogy as the “exploration of the symbolic meanings and theological dimension of the rites of the Church—and not just the rites but the gestures, words, music, images, and structures associated with those rites” (BITW, 99). Caldecott implies that mystagogy requires transitioning through the sacramental principle, that is, through the symbolic form of the celebration of the sacramental liturgy, to its interior, theological meaning. He offers various descriptions of the capacity required for this progression, including a “religious consciousness” that is “sensitive to the many-layered meanings of symbolism” and a “religious sensibility” that “appreciates sacramental and liturgical forms” (‘The Spirit of the Liturgical Movement’). For the sake of convenience, I will refer to this consciousness or sensibility as a ‘sacramental perspective’. Unfortunately, this perspective is largely absent today: thus we are experiencing a mystagogical crisis. Catholics lack the resources to explore the deepest theological meanings of the sacraments and liturgy. Caldecott’s critique of 20th century liturgical reformers’ experiments (which ignored the sacred significance of the liturgy before reducing its meaning in a subjectivist manner) highlights the absence of the sacramental perspective. Diagnosing these errors, Caldecott unmasks nominalism, rationalism, and radical romanticism. While Catholics have many sacramental-liturgical experiences, they rarely explore their life-changing meaning.

How can we restore the perspective required for lifelong mystagogy? Perhaps education is a good place to begin. Interestingly, Caldecott diagnoses the same modern philosophical reductions implicit to both contemporary education and mystagogy. Given his common critique, I would argue that uprooting these limitations from education furthermore frees Catholics for ongoing initiation into the sacramental economy. The trivium and quadrivium’s recovery of a metaphysical perspective of the meaning communicated by words, actions, and aspects of creation further restores a Catholic’s sacramental perspective of the interior reality channeled by sacramental-liturgical matter and form. Admittedly, these approaches differ not only because of their respective contexts but also because mystagogy assumes both catechesis and the gift of faith. Nevertheless, one cannot fail to appreciate a crucial similarity: experiencing the truths communicated both by the trivium/quadrivium and the sacramental liturgy depends upon the interpretation of words, actions, and parts of the cosmos. By capturing students’ hearts and prompting their imaginations, the metaphysical perspective of the liberal arts tradition not only rectifies the fragmenting effects of modern philosophy, but also accrues to the mystagogical benefit of Catholics, freeing them to proceed through sacramental-liturgical symbols and signs to their transformative, theological meaning.  

When God took flesh in the Person of Jesus Christ, he made a wager upon the dignity of the human body. And when Jesus gave his Bride the sacraments, he made a wager upon the dignity of words, actions, and material things. Just as Christ’s sacred humanity allowed his contemporaries to touch his divinity, so too sacramental-liturgical matter and form now permit us to touch the life of God. The failure to see this simple truth signals a sacramental crisis. What is its deepest cause? No doubt, the cultural absence of God and faith in his revelation is at the top of the list. The absence of catechesis, that is, a failure to teach saving truths, is another important consideration. But another factor, which cannot be overlooked, is the absence of wonder, imagination, curiosity, and affectivity: which all contributes to an over-arching boredom with symbolically dense rituals and traditional liturgies. Whereas the Church takes great care to perform celebrations of the sacramental liturgy in a beautiful, dignified manner, few are deeply moved by these.

One reason for this is a characteristically modern way of thinking, acting, and approaching the world. Most contemporary educational curricula have espoused such an approach. By unearthing of the age-old wisdom beneath the liberal arts tradition, Caldecott offers an alternative. He advises teachers how to confront, for example, the empty chasm of nominalism, the power struggle of voluntarism, the claustrophobic prison of rationalism, the cramped laboratory of scientism, and the narcissist pool of emotivism. Surpassing such roadblocks, he argues that the trivium and quadrivium, in particular, restore a sense of humanum, and in so doing open boys and girls, men and women, to expansive vistas of meaning, both in the classroom and the church.  

In the final year of his life, the John Paul II Institute conferred upon Stratford Caldecott a doctorate honoris causa for his adherence to its mission. Without difficulty, one sees the reason for such recognition. Caldecott’s work represents a fitting response to a warning and challenge issued twenty years ago by the founder of the Institute, Pope Saint John Paul II. In Fides et Ratio, the Holy Father explained:

“Wherever men and women discover a call to the absolute and transcendent, the metaphysical dimension of reality opens up before them: in truth, in beauty, in moral values, in other persons, in being itself, in God. We face a great challenge at the end of this millennium to move from phenomenon to foundation, a step as necessary as it is urgent. We cannot stop short at experience alone; even if experience does reveal the human being’s interiority and spirituality, speculative thinking must penetrate to the spiritual core and the ground from which it rises. Therefore, a philosophy which shuns metaphysics would be radically unsuited to the task of mediation in the understanding of Revelation.” (Fides et Ratio, n.83)

The “metaphysical dimension of reality”, explains Pope Saint John Paul II, summons all people through their experiences of truth and beauty, encounters with other people, musings upon existence, and awareness of God. However, “a philosophy which shuns metaphysics”, inhibits this indispensable transition “through phenomena to foundation”, or rather, through experience to meaning. Hence, the Pope appeals for a renewed perspective, capable of overcoming the modern prejudice against metaphysics, which could help explore not only the original meaning of creation but also the mediated, revealed meaning of the new creation bathed in grace.

During his tragically abbreviated career, Caldecott rediscovered a well of resources for confronting the superficiality of the contemporary milieu by renewing the search for meaning and truth, which, in his own words, “leads us beyond the level of phenomenon and appearance to a deeper level of understanding; that is, beyond the visible world to the invisible principles of order” (BITW, 110). While some may judge a worldview founded upon “invisible principles of order” as an old well, long gone dry, Stratford Caldecott has found in it not a parched bottom, but wetted soil. Indeed, he has discovered a second spring.

Rev. Jacob A. Strand is a parish administrator in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. He has just completed his SThD dissertation for the Pontifical Theological Institute of John Paul II for the Sciences of Marriage and Family on the connection between liturgical mystagogy and educational theory in the work of Stratford Caldecott.

If you’re interested in this topic, we invite you to join us over in the Second Spring Education Forum to discuss it further. The topic specifically linked to this article can be found here.

Stratford Caldecott Bibliography:

Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-Enchantment of Education, Brazos Press, Grand Rapids 2009

Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education, Angelico Press, Tacoma 2012

“The Spirit of the Liturgical Movement” in Beyond the Prosaic: Renewing the Liturgical Movement (ed.), S. Caldecott, Bloomsbury T&T Clark, Edinburgh 2000

“Towards a Distinctively Catholic School” in Communio: International Catholic Review 19 (Summer 1992)

“The Search for Wisdom in Education”, 17 June 2012 in the Imaginative Conservative

http://beauty-in-education.blogspot.com/

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