The Liberal Arts: Beauty for Truth's Sake

I will come back to the Gospel of John and Intimations of Apocalyptic colloquium. It was an excellent colloquium.

I just read this inspiring selection yesterday:

“At the heart of any culture worthy of the name ['culture'] is not work but leisure, schole in Greek, a word that lies at the root of the English word ‘school.’ At its highest, leisure is contemplation. It is an activity that is its own justification, the pure expression of what it is to be human. It is what we do. The ‘purpose’ of the quadrivium was to prepare us to contemplate God in an ordered fashion, to take delight in the source of all truth, beauty, and goodness, while the purpose of the trivium was to prepare us for the quadrivium. The ‘purpose’ of the Liberal Arts is therefore to purify the soul, to discipline the attention so that it becomes capable of devotion to God; that is, prayer.” – Stratford Caldecott, Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education, p. 90.

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