Stanley Fish (Save the World on Your Own Time, 2008) chastised modern professors for attempting a “character transplant” in students who had “signed on for something more modest, to wit, a course of instruction.” Charles Murray (Real Education, 2008) made similar points, rebuking the impossibly high ideals of what he called “educational romanticism.” Alongside these critiques, however, came publications that mourn higher education’s failure to address the bigger, interdisciplinary questions. These include recent books by Anthony Kronman (Education’s End, 2007), Martha Nussbaum (Not for Profit, 2010), and Mark C. Taylor (Crisis on Campus, 2010). Kronman, to choose just one example, laments, “I have watched the question of life’s meaning lose its status as a subject of organized academic instruction and seen it pushed to the margins of professional respectability in the humanities, where it once occupied a central and honored place.”

But while critiques of both romanticism and shortsightedness need to be made, rarely do commentators on higher education appear to grasp the full contour of what has been lost. It remains strange that universities, inhabited by a disproportionate number of historians, usually limit themselves to seriously investigating the last century or so when diagnosing their malaise. Medieval wisdom on education can provide some missing perspective, regarding both what learning is and the setting in which it best occurs.

Augustine wrote De Magistro, a dialogue in the form of a conversation between him and his son, in the late fourth century. De Magistro is a surprising treatise. For starters, we find a fourth-century thinker accurately diagnosing the modern/postmodern trajectory that has paralyzed so many educators today:

For just as it is proper to assent to things well explored and perused, so it is perilous to consider things known which are not known. Because there is a danger, when those things are often upset which we supposed would stand firmly and endure, lest we fall into such distrust and hatred of reason that it might seem that confidence in evident truth itself is not warranted.

Following modernity’s epistemic avarice, contemporary thought has indeed fallen, at points, into a “distrust and hatred of reason.” But Augustine not only diagnoses this intellectual condition, he provides a way forward as well.

One reason educational romanticism has had such a grip in American schooling is that it contains an element of truth. Indeed, student-centered, “you can do it” approaches have some value, and Augustine agrees. “Who is so stupidly curious,” he asks, “as to send his son to school in order that he may learn what the teacher thinks?”

Those who are called pupils consider within themselves whether what has been explained has been said truly… Thus they learn, and when the interior truth makes known to them that true things have been said, they applaud, but without knowing that instead of applauding teachers they are applauding learners.

The difference between Augustine and educational romanticism, however, is that the “inner oracle” for Augustine is not the latent power of the unaided student. Instead, this power comes from God: “He who is said to reside in the interior man is Christ, that is, the unchangeable excellence of God and His everlasting wisdom, which every rational soul does indeed consult.” While unquestionably Christian, Augustine’s view is not strictly sectarian—he refers to every rational soul. Augustine combines skepticism in the power of mere words with confidence in a power higher than any human teacher.

Nearly a millennium later, in a treatise also entitled De Magistro, Thomas Aquinas concretized Augustine’s teaching philosophy with two illustrations. First, Aquinas uses a horticultural analogy to caution against Augustine’s Platonism. “Knowledge does preexist in the student,” Aquinas admits, though “not completely but in a seminal state.” Aquinas broadens the role of a good teacher, who is actively to foster an environment where such “seeds” of knowledge can grow: “Now while it is true that no created power has implanted these knowledge ‘seeds’ in us, still the action of a created power [i.e., a teacher] can realize the potential of those seeds.”

Aquinas’ second analogy is a medical one. A physician, according to Aquinas, cannot heal the body. Instead, a physician creates the stimulants and conditions for the body’s healing itself. In the same way, the teacher cannot inspire, illuminate, or impart genuine knowledge—but diligent teachers can greatly improve the conditions for such illumination. For Aquinas, the teacher plays a somewhat larger role within Augustine’s nearly mystical view of student-centered learning.

But it is one thing to expound upon the mystery of learning, and another to discuss the practical conditions necessary for such learning to occur. It is here that ancient and contemporary educational practices may seem most disparate. In an essay titled “Alexandria: A School for Training in Virtue,” Robert Louis Wilken relates that the first-century teacher Apollonius of Tyana gave up on lecturing to large audiences, insisting, “No discourse can be really useful, unless it is delivered to a single individual.” Plutarch agreed, adding, “Admonitions to specific persons produce the most useful fruit.”

The Catechetical school of Alexandria, which drew on Apollonius and Plutarch, understood this well. Learning had to be intimate, because only in this way could a “character transplant” (so distasteful to Stanley Fish) occur. In The Tutor, for example, Clement of Alexandria argued that the role of the teacher was to better students’ souls, not just their minds. Intellectual training certainly followed, but the Alexandrians understood that if knowledge were not planted in the seedbed of wisdom, it would either never take root, or—far worse—grow into something dangerous. From Alexandria we learn that ethics was never a sub-discipline of the educational curriculum, but was, in a way, its entirety.

What’s more, the primary medium for such instruction was not a course, but friendship. Origen, Alexandria’s greatest teacher, understood friendship to be that “affable and affectionate disposition which is shown in the [teacher’s] words and his associations.” A chief metaphor used by Origen’s students to describe their teacher’s legendary effectiveness was the friendship of David and Jonathan described in the Bible. That very scene holds an honored place in the finest visual manifesto for liberal arts renewal that I am aware of—the window scheme of the Princeton University Chapel.

A nineteenth-century master of this pedagogical ideal of friendship was John Henry Newman, who lived it for two decades as a tutor at Oriel College, where the University of Oxford contracted to a human scale. Christopher Olaf Blum’s essay “Newman’s Collegiate Ideal” explains that Newman’s focus on friendship enabled the university to be “not a chance collection of individuals building their careers, but a kind of fellowship, even a friendship, whose characteristic activity was to ‘rejoice in the truth’ (gaudium de veritate).” Common meals were the soil where acquaintanceship grew into friendship, which Aristotle understood to be among the highest of life’s rewards. Genuine learning without the “pure and clear atmosphere of thought” fostered by true friendship was difficult to achieve. Like Origen, Newman understood that “personal influence… was the means of propagating the truth.”

In an age of unmanageable class sizes and overworked (and out of work) professors, advocating such an intimate scale of virtue-based learning may seem naive. Yet such ideals are probably closer to most of our own learning histories than we might think. If a given class distilled more than mere information, but instead shaped our lives and futures, some kind of friendship probably played a role. Wherever our own education occurred, or is occurring, transformative learning continues to happen as it always has—through communities of friendships upheld by some measure of mutual virtue. Even within oversized, impersonal institutions, such communities tend to arise spontaneously.

The bloated modern educational system may be due for collapse. But so far as I am aware, there is no university where the mystery of learning as described by Augustine and Aquinas has been successfully prohibited, or where the Alexandrian ideal of communities of virtue seeking truth through friendships has been effectively proscribed. Whether in the form of a well-managed classroom, a religious fellowship, an Honors College, or one of the university’s increasing numbers of satellite institutions, communities of renewal in higher education have either recovered these principles, or never lost them in the first place. We can wait for massive reform to fix our troubled universities, or we can continue practicing such ideals wherever we are today. That may be the only way to bring about any broader solution.


Matthew J. Milliner is a doctoral candidate in art history at Princeton University. He blogs at millinerd.com.

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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

One problem with the rapidly expanding crisis-in-the-humanities book genre is that few discussing academic reform seem willing to examine thoroughly the ideals that generated Western universities in the first place. One exception I have pointed to before is Stratford Caldecott’s Beauty for Truth’s Sake. For the most part, though, books and articles discussing what has gone wrong in the American universities appear to have done little to seriously investigate the ancient and medieval origins of universities themselves.

Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas distinguishes itself by providing at least some historical background, reaching back to the 19th century to discuss Charles Eliot’s influential presidency at Harvard. Menand points with approval to Eliot’s defense of the liberal arts as distinct from professional or vocational instruction (while strangely failing to mention Eliot’s widely publicized debates with Princeton’s more religiously minded Presbyterian president, James McCosh). The essence of the liberal arts, according to Eliot, was “the enthusiastic study of subjects for the love of them without any ulterior objects.”  He was but regurgitating the most elementary principles of a great and deep tradition, one that—it seems—is lately out of sight and mind.

In Book VII of The Republic, Socrates defended knowledge as sought after “with a view to the beautiful and good,” contrasting someone who deals with numbers for the sake of buying and selling with one who contemplates the mystery of numbers themselves. Aristotle perpetuated this liberal tradition (as opposed to servile tradition), defining ‘liberal’ as “that which tends to enjoyment… where nothing accrues of consequence beyond the using.” Education’s end, for Aristotle, was the pleasure of knowing itself. Cicero agreed, adding that the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake was “a condition of our happiness.” Such truth, he suggested, is the first thing pursued “as soon as we escape from the pressure of necessary cares.”  This enterprise, as systematized by Marcus Varro and fortified by Augustine and Boethius, generated Western civilization’s curricular DNA, which we know as the liberal arts. Probably the best modern articulation of this tradition came with John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University, which—I am sorry to report—seems to have made no appearance at all in our current harping about the humanities. Newman, without requiring religious commitment, articulated the Socratic inheritance exquisitely:

Truth has two attributes—beauty and power; while Useful Knowledge is the possession of truth as powerful, Liberal Knowledge is the apprehension of it as beautiful… That alone is liberal knowledge, which stands on its own pretension, which is independent of sequel, expects no complement, refuses to be informed (as it is called) by any end, or absorbed into any art, in order duly to present itself to our contemplation.

If Newman is right, then to justify the liberal arts, which would now include what we call the humanities, as instrumentally useful, is also to betray them (a fact that several perceptive bloggers have pointed out).

Should this principle—knowledge for its own sake—be understood, the amount of time it takes to obtain a degree in the humanities comes into focus. Menand complains, “You can become a lawyer in three years, an M.D. in four years, and an M.D.-Ph.D. in six years, but the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities disciplines is nine years.” But it is here that the medieval perspective illuminates, making nearly a decade of study seem not ridiculous, but just about right. Culled from Marcia L. Colish’s essay, Teaching and Learning in Medieval Paris, here is what it took to get a degree at that institution which Newman called “the glory of the middle ages,” the University of Paris:

The theologian’s training… involved a two-part course following the arts degree, lasting at least eight years and deferring his theological license to his thirty-fifth year at the earliest—an education more grueling and protracted than that of any other learned professional. First came four years of [extremely rigorous] Bible study… On completion of his biblical course, the young theologian taught Scripture for two years, alternating lectures on Old Testament and New Testament books… Next came a two-year course in systematic theology based on the Sentences of Peter Lombard… After his course on the Sentences, the candidate taught them for two years… Then came three or four more years as a regular participant in theological disputation and preaching, his final oral examination, the award of doctorate, and his admission to the theological faculty as a licensed master.

Menand points out that ABD (all-but-dissertation) teaching in American universities today is a co-dependent, potentially exploitative arrangement that benefits both the University, because graduate students come cheaply, and graduate students, because there are not many jobs. But according to Colish, the twelfth century was not so different. Learning and teaching mixed then as they do today, if for no other reason than that the two skills are closely related partners in the enterprise of contemplation. So what’s the rush? If—as the Parisians once believed—examining the created order (to say nothing of its Creator) is a necessarily ennobling venture worth pursuing for its own sake, then the enterprise demands time. To be sure, a stipend-dispensing University need not formally sponsor all such contemplative activity, and Menand’s call for shortening our contemporary degree-granting process is worth consideration. But perhaps more worth considering is this: Extended study of the humanities may not work within the anti-metaphysical framework that has been advanced in select quarters of academia for the last several decades. If the music of the spheres is not music, but unending dissonance, then even the British-style three-year PhD is far too long. That deadening message can be transmitted in one unpleasant sitting.

In regard to the pressing issue of employment, Marcia Colish’s medieval comparanda are illuminating as well. Having obtained his license, the University of Paris’s new doctor “proceeded to deliver an inaugural lecture, and taught for at least two years at that level. Whether or not he acquired a coveted chair, he often moved on with startling rapidity to ecclesiastical preferment or administrative work in a religious order; theologians rarely grew old in the schools.” Turns out that in twelfth-century Paris, it was hard to find that tenure-track job as well.

Part of the reason for the academy’s present acridity is that many have treated doctoral programs as glorified vocational institutes—getting the degree to get the job. When the job becomes unavailable, the degree, and the years spent acquiring it, become retroactively pointless. To be sure, many who complain about academia are fully justified. They’ve been given a raw deal. Talent does not always rise to the top. The latest fusion of fashion and mediocrity gets tenure, while superior minds get shattering disappointment. That said, anyone who enters this line of work unaware of the employment odds was probably not among such superior minds. Most importantly, it is worth considering that—if Plato’s intimations were sound—then time spent in the self-justifying humanities is time well spent, whether or not it results in certain and sustained employment.

There is good reason that it’s hard to find a job teaching at the university level, both in the Middle Ages and today: such jobs are (or at least should be) enjoyable. Aristotle believed that the exercise of the mind, enhanced by the friendship of colleagues, is the essence of human flourishing. Universities—while frequently failing to realize this ideal—allow for its possibility like no place else. When such conditions are enhanced by subjects as inherently worthwhile as the humanities, life begins to look pretty good. An apocryphal tale has it that when Harvard hired its first lecturer in the fine arts, Charles Norton, the nature of his subject matter permitted his employer to ask, “And will you be needing a salary?” This is not, of course, to suggest that researching and teaching the humanities do not require work—they require a backbreaking amount. But it is worth remembering that many have found such work so inherently worthwhile, so endlessly rewarding, that they have happily done it for free.

Ultimately, the apparent crisis in the humanities may be a metaphysical one, unwilling as many of us are to make the bargain that being itself, or as we might say more clumsily, “the universe,” is both beautiful and good, and thereby worth contemplating for its own sake. But should we take the gamble, the humanities (not to mention the sciences) will flourish, and will continue to be understood as their own reward. At the end of the day, even if one doesn’t believe that the end of the humanities is non-instrumental enjoyment, it is worth riffing off Pascal’s wager to at least pretend that it is. Enjoying one’s subject matter, after all, might help in getting a job.


Matthew J. Milliner is a doctoral candidate in art history at Princeton University. He discussed similar matters in “The State of Higher Desperation” and responded to embittered academic xtranormal videos here. He blogs at millinerd.com.

Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The architect’s hopes, of course, went unfulfilled. The Middles Ages were not repeated, and in September of 1939, what had been dubbed the War to End All Wars, was. In addition, the conceits of architectural modernism outlawed the Gothic style (a fiat that, in some quarters, still endures). Consequently, like most great Cathedrals, St. John the Divine remains incomplete, leading to its nickname “St. John the Unfinished.” Cram himself never got around to a planned reredos. Countless other contributors, be they modern stone carvers or even contemporary artists, have attempted to move the Cathedral towards completion. Such artistic intrusions would not have unsettled Cram. He tirelessly promoted “the intimate bond that unites art and religion in a common service.” Cram had an unusually high view of art that was buoyed by his Christian faith, but was not necessarily limited to those who share it:

[I]n all its manifestations, whether as architecture, painting, sculpture, drama, poetry, or ritual, [art] is the only visible and concrete expression of this mystical power in man which is greater than physical force, greater than physical mind, whether with [Henri] Bergson we call it intuition or with Christian philosophers we call it the immortal soul.

Because of this exalted view of art, Cram believed that it “can be an agency working toward the redemption of human character.” Art, therefore, takes “something of that quality which characterizes the ministry of the Christian church.” Of course, artists don’t always function as these “ministers of minor orders” (and Cram did not hesitate to chastise them when they did not).

The Crossing, by the Cuban-American artist Enrique Martínez Celaya, is the current installation of contemporary art at St. John the Divine (on view through November 23^rd). Martínez Celaya, while perhaps not considering himself a “minister of minor orders,” is certainly haunted by Biblical themes. Consequently, the four large canvases in the Cathedral are an extension of the same artist’s exhibition entitled The Wanderer at the Museum of Biblical Art (on view through December 23). I find myself in agreement with R.R. Reno’s Augustinian reflections on Martínez Celaya’s work.

His skillfully executed paintings and sculptures offer just the kind of bittersweet brooding one expects from the art world at its best. Martínez Celaya’s melancholic surfaces absorb the viewer into an inviting December chill, offering windy blasts of 21^st century irresolution. A vulnerable youth, for example, stands before two ambivalent pine trees not quite fit for Christmas, as if to counter undemanding, generic holiday imagery. Like nearly all contemporary artists, Martínez Celaya questions certainty. Still, in the MOBiA exhibition, his interrogations are presided over by the shelves of antique Bibles innocently presiding above. This dynamic—between artistic questions and religious answers—is intensified in the Cathedral.

The brilliance of the St. John the Divine installation is in the placement, providing an exquisite contrast between Ralph Adams Cram’s ideals and our own. The soaring expanse of St. John’s nave is perhaps best experienced as offset by Martínez Celaya’s less confident ruminations. Likewise, Martínez Celaya’s paintings may have found their most fitting context in these hospitable bays of glass and stone. The rubies in the window dedicated to great missionaries like Bartolomé de las Casas (defender of indigenous South Americans) are juxtaposed with a large canvas of a crippled boy decked with much less celebratory jewels, waiting for a missionary that will not come. The Cathedral’s communications window, which celebrates technology, is contrasted with Martínez Celaya’s painting of a dark, puddled corner of the very earth from which we fear our technology alienates us. A window dedicated to sacrificial heroes of Anglican history is contrasted with a painting of an empty boat, from which no water-walking disciple has lately emerged. Most interestingly, the window dedicated to crusaders mounted on their white horses, is juxtaposed with a painting of a figure on a storm-swept beach, which appears to dismount the same white horse.

Everyone loves to hate the Crusades, and I doubt the progressive Episcopalians of St. John the Divine make that particular window a regular tour stop. This moment of European history has been so caricatured that ranking scholars of the subject, such as Jonathan Riley Smith, have given up on convincing the public of the period’s complexity — a complexity that St. John the Divine’s Crusader window embraces. The window does not glorify violence, but depicts the crusaders’ misfortunes as well as their victories. Furthermore, it collocates the warriors of the Middle Ages with more recent figures, such as the anti-slavery crusader William Wilberforce, or tireless doctors who made breakthroughs against diseases, the names of which we—thanks to such doctors—no longer even recognize. The Crusades function, at St. John the Divine, as a wider emblem for any cause worthy of sacrifice. The generation that erected St. John the Divine had fought in the Great War. They knew sacrifice; and they could therefore recognize, and honor it, in the past.

Ralph Adams Cram, to be sure, could go rhetorically overboard when glorifying the great Christian Middle Ages. But we too have gone overboard in despising so many of the things the windows of St. John the Divine exalt.

Martínez Celaya’s paintings at the Cathedral almost perfectly instantiate this contrast between Cram, who uplifted medieval ideals, and our era, which professionally questions them. To be sure, the religiously minded among us will benefit from Martínez Celaya’s humbling doses of prevarication. But the present generation has need for the invigorating smelling salts of Cram’s celebratory windows as well. To put it bluntly, Cram needs Martínez Celaya, and Martínez Celaya needs Cram.

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” reads the overquoted Yeats line. But lack of conviction more frequently afflicts the average, and passion of some variety almost always animates the best. Unicorns, of course, are mythical; but there are such things as white horses, unsullied causes worthy of our sullied efforts. There are things worth fighting for, including perhaps, a New Medievalism. Cram frequently overdid it, but his was a calculated intensity which took its cues from the severity of the problems the architect aimed to solve. It is uncanny how many of our contemporary ills, whether social dislocation, institutionalized materialism, technological oversaturation or cultural decline, are addressed by solutions similar to those offered by Cram’s bracing neo-medieval rhetoric. Enrique Martínez Celaya, we can imagine, might agree. A new generation, having overdosed on irony, could capitalize on the artist’s intentional ambiguity, and wonder if the elusive figure below the crusading window is not dismounting a white horse, but getting back on.


Matthew J. Milliner is a doctoral candidate in art history at Princeton University. He blogs at millinerd.com.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

A recent display at one of the most helpful monitors of the state of American art, the Whitney Biennial, makes the same point visually. Marianne Vitale’s video installation Patron, involves a room where the artist appears on a flatscreen television, announcing a new artistic movement entitled “Neutralism,” only to mock the exhibit’s viewers and scream out imperious commands such as “spit towards the ceiling.” The video, it is true, winsomely undermines the bombastic art manifestos of the century past. But Patron mocks the pretensions of the postmodern present as well. “Neutralism” is, after all, just another name for the widely held academic posture that claims to be beyond manifestos, but is in fact just another one in disguise. Which is to say, our post-postmodern moment has fully arrived, brought to you by the Whitney Museum of American Art.  Manifestos continue to zoom by us—be they Classical Renewal or Avant-Pop surrender to the Digital Age—but it is tempting to give Marianne Vitale’s send-up of all manifestos, even postmodern ones, the last word.

And yet, there is one twentieth-century art manifesto that does endure, one that lacks either Utopian illusions or imperious claims to neutrality: Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism (1920). One reason for its endurance is the intensity with which the author suffered the meaninglessness that would later inform the Dada movement. As university students, Maritain and his future wife had made a suicide pact: if they did not find some degree of purpose in a year’s time, they would kill themselves. Meaning was summoned by the threat, appearing first in the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and later in the Catholic tradition to which Jacques and Raïssa (his wife) converted. Art and Scholasticism, therefore, was penned on the far side of despair, and was necessarily fortified with metaphysical grit.

In a previous essay at Public Discourse, I pointed to the series of recent publications that constitute a Maritainian revival of sorts, and I summarized the related ideas of one young scholar, James Matthew Wilson, including his refreshing attempt to connect this Maritainian resurgence to conservatism and his helpful recapitulation of Art and Scholasticism.  But there are other New Maritainians to choose from, and I wish here to outline briefly the contributions of two more.

Katie Kresser, a professor of art at Seattle Pacific University, received her Ph.D. in art history from Harvard, and her exploration of Maritainian aesthetics appeared in the quarterly arts journal Image, entitled “Night Vision: Jacques Maritain and the Meaning of Art.” Art historians today sink their theoretical fangs with relish into the soft flesh of neo-Kantian aesthetics or into the tender proposal that art serves as a proxy for American freedom. Kresser, therefore, begins by showing Maritain’s resistance to these critiques. She exploits Maritain’s focus on “pre-conceptual” knowledge (a concept that Maritain borrowed from Bergson). Kresser identifies this kind of poetic knowledge with “night,” thereby exploring an artistic darkness that borrows more from apophatic mysticism than from the negative infinity of the postmodern sublime. To quote one of her more successful formulations, the night is not emptiness, but “a black-bright flood that is Being itself . . .”

In Kresser’s words, the artists’ pre-conceptual intuition understands that a “permeable, spiritual structure inform[s] all matter, like a dazzling liquid skeleton, flowing and interlocking in glittering geometries.” Kresser is here articulating—alongside Stratford Caldecott—the wisdom of classical metaphysics in contemporary idiom. Matter, for Kresser, “is shot through with an order and a significance that makes the poet, the historian, and the mathematician alike cry ‘glory.’” The artist—ideally—should be at the forefront of this doxological parade, seeking transcendence not beyond, but in matter’s “crystalline filaments and swirling fractals of infinite, overlapping complexity.” Because her flights of rhetoric are sustained by a tested ontology, Kresser’s occasionally daring prose sound far more like genuine poetry than last year’s keynote address at Burning Man.

We might criticize Kresser’s quasi-Hegelian claim to identify what exactly the art of “our time” must be like, even if she does provide support for her theories from two contemporary artists (Jean Rustin and Josiah McElheny). But Kresser is especially convincing when she describes the contours of a Maritainian art education, which necessitates the mastery of a given material—discovering, over decades, what the material wants to say as well as what the artist hopes to say through it. “It is only by this means that students will be enabled, once mature, to build fluidly and organically in a manner proportionate to the breadth and complexity of their pre-conceptual lives.”

Another Neo-Maritainin is Gordon Fuglie, a contemporary curator who has left a trail of historically informed, aesthetically passionate prose. His Maritainian contribution appears in an intellectually serious and visually arresting publication entitled A Broken Beauty (Eerdman’s, 2005), edited by Theodore Prescott. Fuglie’s essay charts the loss of beauty as a concept in the art world, which he refers to dismissively (following the art critic Doug Harvey) with the acronym TAW. He also notes the recent resurgence of beauty as a concept, but warns that it too is in danger of becoming yet another passing manifesto. If it is to endure, beauty needs be anchored in deeper metaphysical waters, which leads Fuglie to Jacques Maritain.

Fuglie, however, takes an unexpected rhetorical approach by first linking Maritain to the twentieth-century Jewish art historian, Meyer Schapiro. Schapiro is a darling of contemporary art historians, some seeing in Schapiro—no doubt due to his Marxist commitments—the beginning of “real” art history in the United States. But, similar to James Matthew Wilson’s conservative appropriation of Theodor W. Adorno, Fuglie shows that Schapiro fits quite comfortably into the Maritainian world. Fuglie points to a major address given by Schapiro, “On Perfection, Coherence, and the Unity of Form and Content,” (1964), which is hardly an economically determinative reading of art. The downright Thomistic aesthetic qualities that Schapiro lists in the title of his address emerge not as neo-classical constrictions, but necessary ways of navigating beauty’s mysterious and disorienting terrain. Schapiro also calls also for “collective criticism” over time that tests a given work over generations, vindicating—or exposing—a given work’s aesthetic quality.

The further reflections of Fuglie and other scholars in this volume are well worth exploring, providing an extended diagnosis of TAW ailments, an elucidation of Maritain’s ideas, and an impressive string of contemporary artists who pursue not the visual sedation of prettiness but a beauty that can navigate suffering and loss.  I have focused, however, on the Maritainian touchpoints that Fuglie establishes with Schapiro, because they remind us that Maritain’s philosophy of art “may be used profitably from within a secular viewpoint, since Maritain did not produce it solely from a religious perspective or to serve exclusively religious ends.”

In closing, I offer two small contributions to the Maritainian revival, in the form of criticisms. First, it is important to keep in mind the “friendly fire” that Maritain received from his Thomistic rival, Etienne Gilson. Their differences are nicely elucidated in Francesca Murphy’s essay “Gilson and Maritain: Battle Over the Beautiful” in A Thomistic Tapestry. Gilson effectively widens Maritain’s approach, appealing to different temperaments and sensibilities, thereby extending the potential guest list at the Neo-Thomistic aesthetic table.

Secondly, as Thomism has changed since the 1950s, so must our employment of Gilson and Maritain. Since the mid-century Thomistic ascendency, and somewhat in response to it, an entirely new—and yet, due to its Patristic inspiration, older—metaphysical project has arisen. Hans Urs von Balthasar’s project of frontloading metaphysics with aesthetic concerns has given us an embarrassment of conceptual riches from which to draw. Among the many who have taken his chiefly aesthetic project forward are Aidan Nichols (Redeeming Beauty), and David Bentley Hart (The Beauty of the Infinite). In the words of the latter:

So, now that Gilson and others who so enormously exaggerated Thomas’ originality no longer dominate Thomist scholarship, we may certainly, if we wish, retreat from Thomas’s exquisitely refined terminology to earlier moments in the continuous tradition of Christian ontology that he was interpreting—to the Cappadocians, or Augustine, or Maximus, above all to Dionysius the Areopagite.

All this is to say, while the New Maritainians are faced with certain cultural hostilities that Jacques Maritain did not encounter, they are equipped with fresh resources to which he did not have access as well.

Many consider serious thinking about art to be unnecessary. But to take that position—as too many conservatives have—is to yield the aesthetic domain to those who are willing to think seriously about art.  For the last several decades, such thinkers have been inspired chiefly by twentieth-century French thought, which according to Martin Jay’s magisterial study Downcast Eyes, has uniformly denigrated vision, bequeathing “a palpable loss of confidence in the hitherto ‘noblest of the senses.’” The general public’s alienation from TAW is a direct result of the triumph of this “Neutralist” perspective.  The New Maritainians, however, provide an equally serious alternative, one that can be additionally fortified with the aforementioned supplements.  Beauty—any visitor to Manhattan’s Chelsea gallery district will find themselves concluding—is steadily mounting a clandestine return. It is no wonder, therefore, that Jacques Maritain, one of its most able elucidators, has as well.


Matthew J. Milliner is a doctoral candidate in art history at Princeton University. He blogs at millinerd.com.

They are slipping away from us one by one, the people who can remember those times that once seemed so promising. Names like Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson had a weight about them; you could conjure with them and see the future—a world turned high scholastic and Neo-Thomistic: Catholic philosophy and Catholic art joining to make a golden age.

Indeed there is a time to mourn, and no doubt we have been losing, and will continue to lose, those who were present during last century’s Neo-Thomistic prime. But there may be reason to think they are coming back to us one by one as well.  I am not suggesting that I see new Maritains and Gilsons on the horizon, but only that I see a somewhat compensatory replenishment. Recent studies by Francesca Murphy, Rowan Williams and Steven Schloesser constitute a veritable revival of both figures.  It is not difficult to find emerging scholars also inspired by Gilson’s and Maritain’s ideas. Katie Kresser, a young art historian at Seattle Pacific University, recently argued for a Maritianian approach to art.  And last August, a young scholar and poet at Villanova University, James Matthew Wilson – himself taught by Ralph McInerny – launched an exciting series on beauty and its relation to conservative thought entitled Art and Beauty against the Politicized Aesthetic. Wilson points out that contemporary conservatives make little time for beauty. Hence, I hope to provide a summation of Wilson’s series that will prompt readers to go to the original essays themselves. I have some criticisms of Wilson’s account, but this is not the place for them. The task now is to take notice of a young scholar who – inspired largely by Jacques Maritain – has performed a successful exhumation of beauty as a central, even dominant, conservative concern.

Wilson’s account is anything but another jeremiad regarding conservatives’ lack of regard for beauty and the arts. And yet, to be true to the problem he seeks to address, he begins Part I with a carefully articulated complaint:

Conservatives in our age, if they have any intellectual calling, have tended toward law and the social sciences, particularly—as might seem appropriate—political theory and history. As such, while they often have a profound enthusiasm for certain works of literature and great art, their tastes tend to be informed not only by their a priori political commitments (which can be a good thing) but by their commitment to the explicitly political as well. This can prove stifling.

Conservative thought is captive today to what Wilson names a “politicized aesthetic,” but it was not always so captive. Wilson calls for us to “retranslate Kalon,” that is, to widen our capacity for what the beautiful entails. The task should come naturally to conservatives, for to examine Anglo-American political discourse is to conclude that “conservative thought was born of beauty.”

In Part II, Wilson buttresses this claim by providing a longer trajectory of the conservative approach to beauty. “Conservatism,” claims Wilson, “insofar as it may be deemed a movement, has been primarily an artistic and critical rather than institutional-political one.” Wilson contrasts the conservative Edmund Burke with his famous critic, Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft charged that Burke’s ideas were more beautiful than reasonable. For the ideologically motivated Wollstonecraft, beauty was fundamentally untrustworthy. Burke intuitively connected the politically good and the beautiful, whereas Wollstonecraft disassociated them. To simplify his argument considerably, Wilson sees in this debate a primordial conservative endorsement of beauty, and conversely, a primordial liberal distrust of it.

But however prone towards beauty they may be, conservatives haven’t quite delivered in the arena of beauty and the arts. Or so one might think. To prove otherwise, Wilson summons a grand, creative, primarily literary tradition of conservatism, moving first from Burke to the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. When Shelley, who was no conservative, sought to admire both these “conservative” poets, he could only do so by removing them from their native political nests. But to do this was to ignore that conservative social visions and beauty go hand in hand. Wilson then continues his list of those who perpetuated this conservative legacy of beauty, providing us a goldmine of recovery projects:

So it would be a century later, as agrarians, traditionalists, and orthodox Christians from John Crowe Ransom, Caroline Gordon, William Faulkner, and Allen Tate, to W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Edith Sitwell, Christopher Dawson, and Graham Greene—from Cleanth Brooks, Richard Weaver, and M. E. Bradford to Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley—discovered the dry powder of conservatism tucked away in the base of the heaving, plodding windmill of modern liberal society. Such discovery comes as an explosion. But, because conservative thought survived primarily as literary rather than political gunpowder, its blast echoed only occasionally beyond the ivory tower, literary salon, or front porch.

Happily, Wilson’s is no exhaustive treatment. We could add many more to his list, such as the New Humanism of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, or the films of Eric Rohmer and Whit Stilman.  Seen in this wider perspective, argues Wilson, the Reagan revolution appears less as an apotheosis of conservatism than a temporary sidetrack from the primary conservative concern of beauty.

In Part III and Part IV, Wilson shows that he is not bound by some approved list of conservative thinkers. After eloquently lamenting the division between fine arts and beauty and arguing for their inexorable connection, Wilson turns to the Marxist thinker Theodor Adorno, whose perspective on beauty seems far closer to contemporary conservative concerns than one might initially think. Wilson’s Adorno seeks to cut through ideology and engage reality, “to recover the real, trembling existential nature of man’s encounter with the ‘Book of Nature.’” Despite his rejection of religion, Adorno’s aesthetic theory emerges as a defense of truth and objectivity. Rather than endorsing cheap protest art of the “Marxist” variety, Adorno felt such politicized art was in fact complicit in ideology. Adorno emerges, in Wilson’s account, as the conservative’s fifth column nestled comfortably within liberal walls.

But Wilson is not content to linger on Adorno. For the full array of conservative possibilities for art and beauty, he ushers us into the world of the young Jacques Maritain. Part V provides a contextual explanation and overview of Maritain’s aesthetic project. As anyone familiar with Maritain’s life will know, he was no dry scholastic pacing the empty corridors of a Neo-Thomistic fortress, but a man passionately engaged with the artists of his time, attempting to show “in the most gentle and unassuming manner possible that modern aesthetic theory, when it works itself out, is roughly that of Aquinas.” Wilson’s Maritain could uplift the Middle Ages when “man created more beautiful things… and adored himself less.” But Maritain could also, in the same breath, applaud Romanticism for uncovering art’s spiritual purpose. Such a range of appropriation led Maritain headlong into the creative cauldrons of modernism.

In Part VI, Wilson delves further into Maritain’s Thomistic account of beauty, which showed beauty to be not “pretty” or “attractive”, but actual. “Should we stop anywhere short of beauty,” reads Wilson’s illuminating gloss of Maritain, “we have stopped short of what is real: we have foiled the natural orientation of our intellects, settling for half truths only because beauty is so difficult.” Wilson, like Maritain, sees fine art as a pickaxe by which to mine the hard properties of being, thereby—because being is good and trustworthy—discovering gems.

In his epilogue, Part VII, Wilson individuates from his chief inspiration to show that he is not simply regurgitating Maritain. Drawing on (without fully endorsing) Umberto Eco’s study of Aquinas’ aesthetics, Wilson criticizing Maritain’s “pre-conceptual” understanding of art (the very thing that Katie Kresser embraces). By prioritizing an element of Aquinas neglected by Maritain – proportion – Wilson restores a higher level of rationality to the experience of beauty. “The better we know something,” explains Wilson, “the more beautiful it becomes.” Training in the practice or appreciation of the fine arts, therefore, is not a sub-intellectual pursuit, to be engaged in as a break from the real work of math or science. “Our culture. . . lies to itself in denying the reality of beauty and barbarizes and shallows its intellect in treating aesthetic education as unimportant to the formation of a complete human being.” If the world is beautiful, training in beauty trains us to receive the world as it actually is.

Finally, Wilson is able – just barely – to bring his multifaceted account full circle, returning to Burke’s view that politics and beauty are inseparable. “No society can understand itself without understanding and seeking its proper form,” says Wilson, “and so no society can exist without being graspable primarily in terms of beauty.”

Such was the insight of Edmund Burke and of the conservative tradition to which he was inadvertent godfather. To preserve and reform political forms according to a vision of beauty has been the call of every true conservative. If that summons has too frequently sounded narrow, even monotone, and so failed to register on as wide a range of sensibilities as it might have, that has been a problem of aesthetic or metaphysical vision first and only secondarily one of particular policies or practical politics.

Perhaps then, before conservatives engage in one more round of partisan or internecine disputation, they do best to seriously ponder the nature of a beautiful society. It is often remarked that we need less punditry. We could, however, use another Ambrosio Lorenzetti painting an Allegory of Good and Bad Government in our contemporary Palazzo Pubblico. Wilson’s series show this to be a possibility with precedent. The historical trajectory that yokes beauty and the fine arts to conservatism will be challenged and needs to be strengthened. But for those seriously interested in beauty, Wilson makes a winsome case that the variegated domain of conservatism is certainly a safe (and quite possibly the only) place to be.

Matthew J. Milliner is a doctoral candidate in art history at Princeton University. He blogs at millinerd.com.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

When considered a précis against the lack of theological imagination known as Pantheism, Ross Douthat’s piece in the New York Times (which he expands in an interview) is characteristically brilliant. Douthat’s actual film criticism, however, is somewhat overdrawn. To call Avatar a “long apologia for pantheism” is to give it too much credit. The scriptwriters, perhaps despite themselves, couldn’t help but allow some classical theism to seep in. When the film’s main character, Jake Sully, implores divine assistance, he does not pray to a tree. He prays, almost sacramentally, through a tree to the deity whom he addresses personally, not without the help, I should add, of a sort of communion of saints departed. Douthat explains (rightly) that Pantheism is a religion for people who wish to avoid an “Almighty who interferes in human affairs.” But, in response to said prayer, the film’s deity does indeed—contrary to the native wisdom of the Na’vi—interfere in human affairs.  Needless to say, Director James Cameron is no Andrei Tarkovsky, and “Eywa” (the native deity) is no Aslan – but fictional scenarios can be provided more theological leeway than Douthat permits.

While Douthat uses the movie to critique Pantheism, John Podhoretz uses it to critique a base brand of Hollywood anti-Americanism.  Avatar, claims Podhoretz, asks the audience to “root for the defeat of American soldiers.” Based on this perceived connection, Podhoretz names Avatar “among the dumbest films [he has] ever seen.” As a caricature of corporate greed, Avatar is, unfortunately, as bad as Podhoretz claims. But I’m not so sure about its depiction of the military. In fact, the scriptwriters seem to have gone to considerable trouble to distance the soldiers in the film from the U.S. military.  Colonel Miles Quaritch, played brilliantly by Stephen Lang, is not an enlisted U.S. soldier, but the head of a hired security force comprised of ex-soldiers. Furthermore, while the American army is notably (some would say notoriously) religious, God of any kind means nothing to Colonel Quaritch’s mercenaries.  When he refers to the deity of the natives, his soldiers scoff. There is only one theistic option in this movie, and Quaritch’s army is utterly against it.  This film depicts a military-for-hire that is blatantly irreligious, only then to hinge the plot upon one soldier and a pilot who resist their corrupted leadership.  Notably, Stephen Lang succeeded in depicting the full range of military behavior—from self-sacrificial heroism to an addiction to violence—last year in a staggering one-man off-Broadway show, Beyond Glory. Granted Avatar does not approach this level of complexity, but as a depiction of military life, Hollywood can get much worse.

Then there is Caleb Stegall, a Front Porch Conservative who has long been a gadfly to more prominent conservatives such as Richard John Neuhaus, a role he describes as “loyal opposition,” and which he advances by articulating localist, agrarian ideals. Stegall assumed this posture as editor of the satirical journal The New Pantagruel, and he has kept it up more recently by lobbing challenges at First Things from the Front Porch. In a post subtitled “Reviewing the Reviewers,” Stegall claims that conservative reactions to Avatar are a rehearsal of the debate sparked years ago by Rod Dreher’s book Crunchy Cons (a book Stegall defended at National Review). For Stegall, Avatar is (as it is in this article), “a prism through which one can read the motives, cares, and commitments of its decidedly political reviewers on the right.” Stegall challenges the conservative reviews of Ross Douthat and John Podhoretz, leveling critiques similar to my own. He then adds his own favorable perspective on the film, one also subject to review.

Stegall paints Avatar as Front Porch Republic: The Movie. He identifies themes in the film such as culture and membership, and links them with posts at the Porch. That it takes a quarter of a billion dollar blockbuster to best articulate small-town, localist ideals is, to say the least, odd—but not untrue. Stegall is absolutely right: The blue people do it better. Harmony with nature, respect for food sources, sensitivity to the earth, liturgical vitality, rites of passage, lifelong marriage commitments, horse whispering—all the key ingredients to a harmonious agrarian society. How could one not be attracted to the ideals so beautifully presented in this film? The problem is, Avatar is not describing how the world might be if Wendell Berry were president; it’s describing a world without a Fall.

It is odd that amidst the innumerable citations the reviewers have noticed in the unoriginal script of Avatar, there has been (to my knowledge) no mention of C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, which ushered the Christian imagination into space long before the emergence of Star Wars or Star Trek. Lewis paints a picture of space—better termed the heavens—as an “empyrean ocean of radiance.” A dazzling variety of planets singing to their Creator, one of which—our own—is tempted by “The Bent One,” in turn losing this music to become “The Silent Planet.” When visitors from our Silent Planet visit planets that have not experienced a similar rebellion, the scenario is very much like the earthlings visiting Pandora in Avatar. Fallen humans, in comparison to the inhabitants of Lewis’ distant, unfallen planets, are inevitably corrupted. When further demented by “The Bent One,” they become hyper-Hegelian monsters. One professor describes his chilling ideal of an ideal future of pure Mind, which is far too close to modern reality:

We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life… all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little of course. Slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation.

And yet, there is a resistance in Lewis’ Space Trilogy from those who believe in Maleldil, who, like Aslan, corresponds to the Christian God. Long before the indigenous Ewoks fought the mechanized Empire in Return of the Jedi, C.S. Lewis painted a picture of an organic, traditionally religious resistance to a tree-killing evil machine that looks much like the military/corporate alliance in Avatar. In fact, Avatar’s “unobtanium”—the element that justifies earth’s mission on Pandora—can perhaps be understood as a version of that fruit that one of Lewis’ characters discovers on the unfallen planet Perelandra: “For one draught of this on earth,” remarks Ransom, “wars would be fought and nations betrayed.” Indeed, one of the lessons of Lewis’ Space Trilogy is that the pleasures of unfallen worlds are impossible for a fallen race (humans) to handle. Seen not only through 3-D glasses, but through the lens of Lewis’ Space Trilogy, Avatar emerges not as a defense of Pantheism, an anti-American screed or as a vision of ideals realizable on this planet: Instead, it’s a depiction of Eden.

And this brings us back to Stegall, who is right to suggest, alongside Ann Marlowe, that conservatives have overlooked things of value in Avatar. But those things of value, a perfect fusion of inhabitants and habitation, are impossibly far from being real alternatives on the planet that we inhabit. When one sees Avatar with Lewisian eyes, Stegall’s brief article highlights a criticism that Postmodern Conservatives at First Things have made of Front Porchers: some of their ideals seem suited for a world without a Fall, if not the primordial one, at least one without the second Fall of the Enlightenment. This is not to say that such ideals should not be promoted. One primary appeal of the Front Porch Republic is that it uplifts such principles, hence increasing their appeal, and their probability for real market success.

These localist principles, however, are best realized (and admittedly diluted) not despite of, but within the democratic capitalist arrangement we’ve been bequeathed. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), for example, succeeds not as an anarchic cog in the market system but as a more appealing alternative that competes with supermarket chains and—because CSA tastes better and costs less—prevails. Walkable urbanism need not be billed as a Molotov cocktail tossed angrily at suburbia, but as a more alluring alternative that, as one recent book has argued, can naturally evolve from sprawl in response to consumer demand. The ideals of the Front Porch Republic are essential to the rehabilitation of conservatism, but the real work is in transposing them into the key of reality.  Between the purest of such principles and modern life stands a somewhat formidable obstacle: “a cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.”

Matthew J. Milliner is a doctoral candidate in art history at Princeton University. He blogs at millinerd.com.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Genuinely transcending the division between the sciences and humanities today would be an ambitious project, involving the entirety of the human person—body, mind, spirit—marshaled to perceive the actual order of an objective cosmos. Occasionally, a given professor or student in contemporary academe might imagine what this holistic perspective would be like. It is a temptation felt especially by those who study the Classical world or the Middle Ages, both so deeply influenced by Pythagoras. But the cosmic image of old, as C.S. Lewis once put it, was discarded. Intuitively we moderns want it back, but modernity relentlessly catechizes the educated into dismissing any proposed unity between math, art, religion, and physics as offensively presumptuous, the intellectual fare of fools. The disciplinary border police, patrolling quarantined academic sectors with punitive labels such as “dilettante” and “crackpot,” forbid any such attempts.

At most, a modern mind nostalgic for a holistic cosmos waits patiently for science to deliver a Theory of Everything, hoping that perhaps sometime in the future, physics and spirituality (never religion) might meet. But Stratford Caldecott, who heads the Center for Faith and Culture at the University of Oxford, has no such patience. His book, Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-Enchantment of Education, insists that we need not pin our hopes only on some distant synthesis, for by reconstituting the liberal arts tradition, such a synthesis is available now. Should one discard prejudice against traditional faith, there is an impressive array of scholars and religious leaders who have been moving towards such a synthesis for decades. Caldecott provides us with excerpts from the best of them, fusing these authors into a manageable manifesto—with an extensive bibliography—that attempts to enter into what Caldecott calls “the Pythagorean spirit which lies at the root of Western civilization.”

Caldecott’s manifesto champions the liberal arts tradition, first grouped by the Pythagoreans and established in the great Cathedral schools of the Middle Ages.  According to this lost vision, the trivium—grammar, rhetoric and dialectic—was linguistic preparation for navigating the quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music—the very disciplines that Plato believed able to distinguish the numerical harmony of the cosmos. Caldecott is critical of authors like Dorothy Sayers who defend the trivium, while ignoring the less familiar quadrivium. Still, he does not suggest that the seven liberal arts simply be taken up as they were. Caldecott advises resumption, but also a broadening and adaptation of the liberal arts tradition, one that teaches the history of given disciplines as well as the disciplines themselves. But what unites these various disciplines is beauty, understood not as a subjective perception, but as harmonious order that is complex in ways we cannot yet imagine. On this point, Caldecott quotes Socrates: “The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful.”  Caldecott has no difficulty amassing a range of reputable contemporary scientists who insist that beauty is as central to their subject as it is, or at least once was, to fine art.  When investigating the Universe, the encounter of beauty – even “irrational beauty” – is an essential clue that one is on the right track.

Caldecott is deeply aware of how strange his project will sound to modern ears. Accordingly, he counters anticipated suspicion at every step. He quotes at length from respected figures such as philosopher Charles Taylor, physicist David Bohm, and Benedict XVI, all of whom he convincingly mobilizes in service to his vision. Caldecott repeatedly assures us that he has no desire to simply return to the medieval mindset; he only wishes to be guided by its perception of a meaningful world. Caldecott summarizes his vision in three points: First, with countless educators today, he bemoans how the fragmentation of education has eliminated overall meaning, opting for unconnected details instead; second, he proposes that renewed meaning involves educating people to perceive the form—the beauty—of the cosmos; and third, this meaning is ultimately doxological and liturgical, for “cosmology leads only to the threshold of theology.” Caldecott is unapologetically Catholic, but he has mastered his tradition enough to fathom the underestimated extent of its hospitality to outsiders. The book, which quotes Islamic and Hindu sources in addition to Christian and Classical ones, thus succeeds in addressing a wider audience, so long as that audience has respect for religion.

Caldecott’s perspective requires symbolic vision and “poetic imagination,” that faculty which unites what our minds tend to keep separate. Again wary of incredulity, he insists that such symbolism need be balanced by the logic and empirical observation emphasized by the Enlightenment. For example, we can learn from the medieval bestiary how to read the world poetically, without subscribing to its primitive zoology. Caldecott’s treatment of numerology and geometry will perhaps provoke the most initial incredulity, but to my surprise, such treatments comprise the book’s core, and were delightfully convincing. Caldecott elucidates Simone Weil’s claim that geometry is “the most dazzling of all the prophecies which foretold the Christ.” We may laugh at Dan Brown’s use of the Fibonacci sequence in The DaVinci Code, or at the spooky numerological twists to the television series Lost. On a higher cultural plain, we can shudder at Darren Aronofsky’s film Pi, where a mathematical genius discovered a numerical order to the world, and is terrified by it. Caldecott, however, goes beyond both mockery and fear, helping us to see that these are but contemporary cultural echoes of a distant, ancient synthesis. Numerical order is in fact an integral part of Western civilization—one that does not reveal a horrific reality, but a beautiful one.

Caldecott’s treatment of music and architecture is equally exciting, and anything but parochial. With the Greeks, he understands music, the “art of the muses,” to comprise the entirety of intellectual culture. He cites Daniel Chua’s lament that in the modern world, “the harmony of the spheres has collapsed into the song of the self.” Ruling out neither chant nor electric guitar (but privileging the former), Caldecott quotes C.S. Lewis, who, like Pythagoras and Ptolemy before him, believed that “music which is too familiar to be heard enfolds us day and night and in all ages.” Likewise, Caldecott summarizes the recent revival of sacred, symbolic architecture, citing both traditional architects like Notre Dame’s Duncan Stroik and experimental ones like Berkeley’s Christopher Alexander.  Regarding astronomy, Caldecott turns the tables on Johannes Kepler’s assumption that uncovering the elliptical, not perfectly circular, orbit of the planets was like discovering a “load of dung” in the heavens. “The medieval astronomers were wrong,” insists Caldecott. “There is actually nothing imperfect about an ellipse. It differs from a circle by having two centers or foci rather than one . . . Kepler’s original mistake did not lie in his Christian Pythagoreanism, but in his attempt to prejudge the mathematical forms he would find in nature.”

Caldecott is eager to challenge complacency, and he tries to provoke the modern mindset with the prod of beauty: “If you push the postmodern relativist, you will almost certainly be able to get an admission that he would prefer to look up at a gorgeous sunset than down into the latrine.” Caldecott is skeptical of the dreary skeptics who populate our disenchanted world: “While we cannot anymore accept the details of medieval cosmology, this fundamental intuition of the Logos has never been disproved. In fact . . . the most recent developments in science could be said to confirm it.” What gave us the shift towards secularism was not science, but ideology:

A popular misconception has it that medieval man thought the world was flat, and modern science gave us a round world floating in an infinite space. But the truth is almost the opposite of this. Medieval man inhabited a three-dimensional cosmos which has now been largely replaced by a flat universe with no ontological depth.

Our divided academic disciplines have been wearied by their longtime separation, and Caldecott upholds objective beauty as a powerful, but neglected, adhesive. The book is not recommended, but urged upon all. The book may baffle moderns suspicious of the analogy of being, frustrate mathematicians who see their field as an escape from religious questions, annoy artists who thought their pursuit of beauty could avoid arithmetic, and bother scientists frustrated with the growing religious ranks within their onetime secular domain—but it will delight those with ears to hear the music of the spheres which hasn’t ceased. Dostoevsky’s prediction that “beauty will save the world” is pending eschatological verification. In the meantime, Stratford Caldecott successfully argues that it can at least save education.



Matthew J. Milliner is a doctoral candidate in Art History at Princeton University. He blogs at millinerd.com.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Art matters for conservatives not least because it matters for everyone. In the words of Etienne Gilson, “Art is not the highest of the activities of man. Still, it is one of them, and no other can take its place. If art is the making of beauty for beauty’s own sake, there is no imaginable substitute for it.” That said, the arts do not always so function, and there are consequently good reasons for conservative suspicion towards them. Three such complaints come to mind. The arts are seen as too rarefied, religious, or radical. I will address each of these complaints in turn.

Some conservatives take issue with the rarefied notion of “fine art” itself, pointing to the neglected beauty of common craft and everyday pursuits from which the “fine arts” sought, dubiously, to be distinguished. In A Mirror for Artists, an essay that foresaw the National Endowment for the Arts three decades before it was created, Donald Davidson articulates this frustration, voicing the Southern Agrarian complaint that the arts in the industrial North function as a luxury beyond reach of the common person. “The attempt to glorify the arts by setting them aside in specially consecrated shrines can hardly supply more than a superficial gilding to a national culture, if the private direction of that culture is ugly and materialistic,” he wrote. This is true enough, but Davidson’s complaint overlooks the possibility of having beauty in both the arts and life. If beauty is important, it is indeed worthwhile for there to be a class of pursuits, professions, and institutions devoted to seeking it, and it alone. Institutionalized fine arts can detract from crafts and other activities—such as metalwork or carpentry—that arrive at beauty indirectly. But to assume they must is like suggesting that eating at a restaurant necessarily undermines the act of cooking at home.

Other conservatives distrust the arts on religious grounds. Following the Enlightenment categorization of fine art came the Romantic invention of capital “A” Art as a rival to the more established religious traditions. “Most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy,” remarked Matthew Arnold, “will be replaced by poetry.” Arnold, however, was in this case a false prophet. Conservatives should have enough faith in their more tested religious traditions to realize that the “religion of Art” has not proven a very strong competitor. As Jacques Barzun understood, Art is unable “to reach the divine center from which redemption comes, and is punished for its presumption… [Art] lacks a theology or even a popular mythology of its own; it has no bible, no ritual, and no sanctions for behavior.” It is true, as one recent book has indicated, that art continues to act as a kind of “alternative religion for atheists.” But it is a religion thin enough that it sometimes actually leads to thicker, traditional faith. If beauty is understood—as it long has been—as a transcendental value, then a strong case can be made for the artistic pursuit of beauty even outside of beauty’s native religious milieu, as a corollary, not competitor, to robust traditional faith. Barring that, the Catholic Gilson is again insightful, even daringly generous: “To those who communicate with pure being chiefly through esthetic experience, the beautiful becomes a substitute for the divine…. Better a wrong religion than none at all.”

Finally there is artistic radicalism that, conservatives rightfully perceive, remains a dominant cultural paradigm. Radical politics, however, have on the whole not been good to the arts, from the intricate networks of artistic patronage that were intentionally destroyed in the French Revolution to Stalin’s insistence that Popular Front culturati forsake the frivolity of abstraction for Socialist Realism. Still, the Marxist school of art criticism, from Adorno to Zizek, is a resilient one—and yet, a troubled one. Progressive art theorists are repeatedly confounded by the ability of capitalism to absorb and commodify its artistic critique. If one’s objective is class struggle, the artistic agenda scrawled on a Paris wall in 1968 is difficult to refute: “The most beautiful sculpture is a paving stone thrown at a cop’s head.” The avant-garde is tired, retreating—as Susan Sontag did toward the end of her career—to the base-camp of beauty. Beauty, furthermore, has had a powerful enough academic resurgence to have provoked yet another recent anthology. Beauty rivals the Marxist paradigm because it, after all, is a protest of its own; the presence of beauty naturally challenges the injustice and disorder of what conservatives understand to be a necessarily imperfect world.

A limited, but still profoundly significant understanding of the arts therefore lies buried beneath the rarified, religious, and radical distortions of fine art that conservatives rightfully criticize. This understanding sees fine art as a means of pursuing beauty—even the terrible or wounded kind—for its own sake, in a way that opens towards the transcendence best mediated by traditional faith. This is where the more conservative tradition of artistic patronage and reflection finds its home.

The best methods of such artistic patronage will be a varied—individuals, organizations, corporations, universities, town councils, and others all doing their parts. There is a place for large-scale government funding of the arts, albeit a limited one. Such funding, as Michael J. Lewis points out, is less effective at spotting new trends or anointing new artists, and more helpful in preserving established but endangered forms of art such as classical orchestras or ballet, “works validated by the cumulative consensus of time.”

Conservative reflection upon the arts is central, for the key to intelligent patronage is an informed public, but conservatives need especially to widen their discourse on the arts. Some suggest that classical styles are superior, and there is indeed much to be said for these established traditions, which should receive the benefit of the doubt. But to see other styles as necessarily subversive of social order is unnecessarily restrictive. Hilton Kramer has suggested that modernism in art need not be understood as a scapegoat for social decay. Instead, “modernism has played a decisive role in making bourgeois life a more liberal, a more enlightened, and a spiritually more spacious environment than it once was.” We could add that even postmodern art can be scanned for places where it captures—or is captured by—the beautiful, which is no respecter of styles.

The nagging question of where money for art can come from is also addressed by Kramer: “The defense of art must not… be looked upon as a luxury of civilization—to be indulged in and supported when all else is serene and unchallenged—but as the very essence of civilization.” While this statement may be hyperbolic, it is a helpful corrective to cultural pragmatism.

Where do the arts stand in relationship to conservatism today? There are indeed a number of astute writers on the arts in the conservative spectrum, laboring diligently, often to wonderful results. Many of these writers, however, are connected to The New Criterion, which as an exclusively cultural journal remains an isolated, and consequently embattled voice, not to mention an endangered one. The “severe” financial threat level prominently displayed at their website does not strike me as a bluff. Somewhere over the horizon is an elephant graveyard, where noble conservative cultural efforts, from The New York Sun to Culture 11, go to die. The reasons for these failures are complicated, but lest the bones pile higher, there need be readjustments in conservative priorities, practices, and budgets.

Perhaps the best barometer of the state of conservatives and culture comes from pointing to the number of other conservatives who are sounding the culture alarm. The journal founded by Russell Kirk, Modern Age, devoted their fiftieth anniversary issue (Fall 2007) to the matter of conservatives and culture. Therein several writers leveled complaints similar to my own, the difference being that their appraisal is far more severe. John Vella opens with a bang: “Art and architecture, environmental conservation and urban planning are concerns conservatives have foolishly ceded to the Left…. Truth and beauty go hand in hand.” Kevin Cope complains that conservatives trade genuine beauty for a “somewhat abstract national conservative taste.” Catesby Leigh laments the “utilitarian, individualist ethos that has come to dominate the conservative mind, while nurturing the sprawl phenomenon.” James Cooper argues that “Beauty contains the key to a door that conservatives have been trying to unlock for almost a century.” Conservatives have wasted time in protesting bad NEA choices, when “what they should have been doing is helping create an alternative.” More recently in a forum connected to Modern Age, James Matthew Wilson has pointed to the overly narrow constrictions conservatives have placed on the category of beauty. Lastly, at Doublethink Conor Friedersdorf has complained that, when it comes to culture, conservatives just complain.

Conservatives have a culture problem. They have less of a religion problem, a fact that can assist in conservative cultural renewal. In the words of George Steiner, the arts actualize “a root-impulse of the human spirit to explore possibilities of meaning and of truth that lie outside empirical seizure or proof.” By viewing the arts as the pursuit of beauty in all its variety, and by seeing such pursuits as a vestibule to traditional faith, the arts can flourish under conservative auspices. Absent this transcendent framework, conservative cultural activity and discussions quickly calcify into a repulsive harrumph. Conservatives looking to make a beginning in the arts would do well to remember John Ruskin’s lifelong insistence that “All great art is praise.”

Matthew J. Milliner is a doctoral candidate in Art History at Princeton University.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

It is not my intention to ridicule a great man for avoiding plays; Witherspoon’s was a different time and his decision was, I believe, justified.  John Adams, an acquaintance of Witherspoon, was faced with a similar quandary. When confronted with the luxury of Parisian Society, he famously stated: “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”

Both Witherspoon and Adams, faced with a choice between pressing duty and an appreciation for Molière and Mozart, wisely chose duty. It is a choice that Witherspoon and Adams needed to make, but a choice that we—being generally more disposed to the arts than were Popular-party Calvinists, and enjoying the relative degree of political stability that Adams lacked—need not make. Yet, the contemporary American heirs of Witherspoon and Adams rarely seem to get around to enjoying one of the rights that Adams hoped to secure for us: the right to both cultivate and savor the arts.

To familiarize oneself with contemporary conservative ideas and publications often means choosing culture wars over culture. Conservatives are practiced in lionizing the classics and lamenting the decline of Western culture, but should one wish to fully engage the culture of our time, a Leftward drift is difficult to resist. For example, the editor of a successful journal devoted to religion and the arts, Image, recently announced his need to “walk away from the conservative movement,” for he found the “imposed abstractions” of contemporary conservatism less than conducive to the sponsorship of poetry, art and fiction. While I take issue with his decision, I admit it is understandable, for the arts and contemporary conservatism don’t quite go hand in hand. There are, of course, exceptions. The New Criterion has, since 1982, been devoted to challenging the fact that “the Left defined the only possible standard of enlightenment in matters having to do with art and culture.” But, to my knowledge, The New Criterion never aimed to be the sole enterprise in this regard. As the arts rarely attain more than token coverage in conservative journals and forums, The New Criterion—passionately despised by the Left when not ignored—often seems to go it alone.

Conservatism’s less than energized attention to the arts is, to be sure, understandable. Sifting the wheat from the endless fields of present-day cultural chaff is a herculean chore, and appears a luxury considering the urgent issues that rightly occupy the conservative mind. Does one really expect a honed pro-life advocate to put down her pen mid-argument to embark on a pleasant afternoon gallery stroll? Likewise, should a disciplined poet, lost in contemplative gaze, interrupt a potentially fruitful reverie for a primer on the current state of bioethics? Perhaps not, but should conservatism wish to retain its current adherents and attract new ones, attention to the arts may not be a choice, but a mandate—for patronage of culture, rightfully pursued, recalls for conservatives just what it is they hope to defend.

It is tempting here to lionize the past, searching for a successful blend of the political and cultural temperaments in journals of yore, such as the famous, but now defunct, Partisan Review. Though never reaching more than 10,000 subscribers, the publication displayed an impressive longevity (1934-2003). Even more impressive were its list of contributors, a virtual who’s who of twentieth century literary figures—Czeslaw Milosz, Clement Greenberg, Saul Bellow, Franz Kafka, T.S. Eliot, George Orwell, Erich Auerbach, Albert Camus, and W.H. Auden, among many others. What makes this more remarkable is that Partisan Review was not an “arts” journal, but was earnestly political. “The magazine,” once insisted the editors, “was both anti-fascist and anti-communist long before it became commonplace to identify the two forms of totalitarianism and to regard them with equal repugnance.” And yet, space was intentionally reserved within this agenda for poetry, fiction, and art criticism that, while not completely free from politics, was related to political agendas in much more complex and subtle ways.

Perhaps, it could be insisted, Partisan Review was a cultural success because it published through the golden age of modernism. With such impressive contributors to choose from, how could they not succeed? But to so assume is to forget that Kafka and Eliot did not spring full born from the head of—in this case—Apollo, the god of the arts. Instead, these young writers were first gambled upon and then cultivated. The way that Partisan Review succeeded in the cultural arena was the only way it can ever be done: by deliberate effort. I’ll let the Partisan Review editors explain: “Our policy has been to resist the growing division in modern culture between the sensibility of art and the more rational intelligence that has gone into social and philosophical thinking. We think that there is a level of the contemporary mind at which these currents meet—a level providing common ground for the educated readers and avant-garde writer, who have been kept apart by all sorts of prejudices and conventions.”

Though we could do without Partisan Review’s fifties-chic irreligion (one essay on Jacques Maritain begins by announcing Catholicism as “the oldest and greatest totalitarian movement in history”), the journal still has much to teach. Should conservatism wish to become a cultural force it will require consciously resisting the natural tendency to bifurcate culture and politics. Culture captures hearts and minds often so much more successfully than does an argument—something the Left knows well. Like some sort of artistic arms race, the side of our undeniable political gulf that first develops a winning strategy for the future cultivation of culture may very well win. Conservatism has the principles, dispositions, roots and resources to emerge as a powerful sponsor of the arts, but in comparison to the Left, it often seems to lack the will.

An illustration from my field of study, Byzantine art history, shows how culture can be encouraged in tandem with conservative cultural stands, not apart from them. On a recent research trip to Greece, I had the fortune of driving through the Peloponnese. My itinerary included some of the most fabulous Byzantine and Venetian fortresses on offer. The cliff-top monasteries of Meteora, the dramatic stone citadel of Monemvasia, the Venetian stronghold of Nafplion, and the last Byzantine holdout before Ottoman conquest—Mistra. As I drove between the sites, my choice of listening material was, for a humanities graduate student, a curious one: the audio proceedings of the Making Men Moral conference, which was recently discussed here in Public Discourse. The scenario presented by the various speakers, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Hadley Arkes and Robert George among them, was not a positive one. Just as Byzantines and Venetians defended themselves against the Ottomans, so conservatives today defend against serious threats to precious norms such as the sanctity of human life.

But when I paused the audio, parked the car, and passed through the fortress walls that had witnessed—it is no exaggeration to say—epic struggles, I encountered culture. This was most in evidence at Mistra. Mistra was a tough nut to crack—holding out against the Ottomans seven years longer than Constantinople, finally falling in 1460. But the business of Mistra was more than just defense. Wandering through the remains, I explored gorgeous red-tiled churches decorated with exuberant, even playful frescos, what some have called the “final flowering” of Byzantine art. Resources were allocated, of course, for food and weaponry, but for pens and paintbrushes as well. Here legendary Renaissance scholars such as Gennadius Scholarius and Gemistus Pletho engaged in refined pursuits, all when faced with something we, thankfully, are not yet facing: imminent collapse. By no means do I think that conservatism is in its last throes, but it is deeply instructive that as Byzantium was faced with a terrible (and ultimately triumphant) threat—they patronized culture. Perhaps it was the seriousness of the peril that led the Byzantines to reach toward artistic accomplishment, just as the seriousness of the Cold War threat may be what pushed Partisan Review to bear such cultural fruit.

The two Johns, Witherspoon and Adams, were occupied enough with nation building that they had not the luxury to engage in cultural pursuits, but we can; and doing so is not a betrayal of conservatism, but its fulfillment. Conservatives can both stand guard on the critical issues of the hour, and aggressively cultivate art, architecture, poetry, literature and music. It is a point well understood by Elshtain, who quoted generously from Partisan Review contributors such as Czeslaw Milosz and Albert Camus in both her Gifford Lectures and her Making Men Moral address. Like Mistra, we can defend the walls (hopefully to more success than the Byzantines), while sponsoring the arts within the boundaries that we secure. Artistic souls who think this an overly militarized analogy do well to consider it further, for Mistra bears an uncanny resemblance to our current situation. Look out from the walls of that Byzantine fortress on a clear summer day as I did, and one will see the vast plane of Sparta, near to which is the infamous chasm of Ceadas. Therein the Spartans—who left civilization little culture to speak of—cast their deformed or weakly infants for whom they had no need.

Matthew J. Milliner is a doctoral candidate in Art History at Princeton University.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.