The Radiance of Being
If the New Evangelization demands that Catholics engage others in fruitful dialogue, that dialogue demands an honest listening to the echoes of truth reverberating in the world around us. I turn to Stratford Caldecott for an example of the kind of mind, the kind of relationship with reality this engagement requires. For him, there is in every subject a bit of preparatio evangelium to be found. In The Radiance of Being, Caldecott extends his interest into the worlds of science, philosophy, comparative religion, art, math, architecture and more – letting his readers look through his own faith-filled gaze at shards of the splintered mirror of Truth. It takes a mixed metaphor to describe what is happening in this book. We listen, we look, we taste – Radiance is an encounter with the world, not as a textbook full of information to be learned, but as an adventure to be experienced.
Caldecott’s collection of essays is a courageous and critically important model of the kind of thinking we must learn to do before we launch into the deep of interfaith, or intercultural conversation. It is courageous, because Catholics – even faithful ones – are too accustomed to a lazy partitioning of the world into compartments that do not communicate. How we then expect to “communicate” Christ, I cannot imagine. Within the one labeled “religion,” we can feel safely correct, and fail to connect with the spiritual wanderings of those who are not yet, actually, lost. If we are “spiritual” we may pooh-pooh doctrine, and if “orthodox” we may lightly dismiss the witness of lived experience others bring to the table. Thankful for the Light of Truth, we can still fail to explore the world by its illumination.
The arts might be dismissed as potentially dangerous, or allowed to rise to quasi-religious status that obscures our view of dogma. Philosophy can leave us in a morass of relativism, or we might leave it in a huff, because pre-Christian philosophers don’t acknowledge Christ. When it comes to the one labeled “science,” we are too often either credulous – believing whatever is dished out as having been validated by scientific method – or suspicious – wary of anything the Church hasn’t told us directly. Neither of which, since wonder and sincere interest are prerequisites for seeing the Glory of God through scientific discoveries, are helpful in weaving together a fabric of continuity between the wrongly disjointed spheres of science and religion.
The Radiance of Being is critically important, because this fabric must be woven upon a matrix of Wisdom, of Word, and of words like Caldecott’s that articulate the points of correspondence, and the areas that are in need of closer examination. Catholics with the capacity to reach into the complexities of quantum physics, or the murky depths of world religions must go ahead, and return to lead the rest of us. Stratford Caldecott, in this and other books, continues, even after his death in 2014, to beckon us out into the territory he explored by the light of Catholic faith. Radiance is a guidebook by a reliable guide, with contagious passion for the Glory he, like Gerard Manley Hopkins, finds flaming out, “like shining from shook foil” from every direction.
But we Catholic readers are, alas, all too ready to dismiss a book by a theologian because it is not practical, and one by a scientist because it is too hard. Luckily, Caldecott is neither. He approaches the faith as a devotee, science as a poet, and neither with pseudo-intellectual detachment. Radiance is not speedily digested, but satisfies the hunger for correspondence to “reality, in the totality of its factors” that Fr. Luigi Giussani (founder of Communion & Liberation) identifies as the basis for human freedom. It is practical, in the best sense – that, through it, a reader may practice thinking well and truly. And it is also hard in the best sense – that it contributes solidly to the infrastructure, not just the surface, of the reader’s intellectual faculties.
In the way of a born educator, Caldecott has delivered content in a form that is both accessible and that has the capacity to in-form his readers. (His books on education, Beauty for Truth’s Sake, and Beauty in the Word are must-reads for anyone who wonders how to teach as well as he does.) His modeling of the Christian’s conversation with Reality is the kind of intellectual structural support the New Evangelization needs to go beyond “relationship with Christ” to “Christ in relationship with Reality”. There are seeds in Radiance for a harvest of fruitful and fascinating conversations. I can vouch for the avidity with which young people listen to conversations like these. They are hungry to talk about more than religion, and longing to experience their faith as an adventure of discovery, connection, and dialogue.
Caldecott moves with ease between quantum physics and theology, particles and persons, architecture and philosophy in this sweeping look at the coherence of Being. Here, for instance, is a gem of such synthesis:
“…knower and known, while eternally distinct, belong to one single reality, and the meaning at the centre of that reality is the Person of the Logos. The unity-in-distinction of the Trinity is the basis for an analogy that runs right through creation as a kind of watermark: the analogy of ‘spousal’ union between subject and object, self and other. The life of love revealed in Christ promises to each of us no mere absorption into the Beloved, but our own integrity and fulfillment in the very measure we give ourselves away.”
I dare Catholic teachers to find a way to work spousal union into their next science, art, philosophy, or history class!
As I read The Radiance of Being (over again - you’ll end by wanting to begin again), I am reminded of the poetic, spiraling structure of the writings of St. Pope John Paull. Such masterpieces are going to frustrate casual, or pragmatic readers, but they are full of light and life for those who enter in humility. We need teachers who model for us constructive engagement with difficult ideas, and who help us to internalize their own way of approach.
Our culture tends to despise, or ignore mediating structures, so we are not always aware that what is lacking in us is not facts and content, but the matrix of support, the capacity to receive content, and to respond to it with good judgement. Writing like Caldecott’s helps form that invisible ladder that helps us up to higher reaches. Caldecott summarizes Radiance in the words of Joseph Ratzinger: “We have to make evident once more what is meant by the world’s having been created ‘in wisdom’…Only then can conscience and norm enter again into proper relationship.”
If you want to get just to a point, this is not the book for you. If you want to connect all the dots, start here.
This review first appeared in St. Austin Review.