Stratford Caldecott Quotes

To be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality

The world is a fabric woven of mysteries, and a mystery is a provocation to our humanity that cannot be dissolved by googling a few more bits of information.

The central idea of the present book is very simple. It is that education is not primarily about the acquisition of information. It is not even about the acquisition of ‘skills’ in the conventional sense, to equip us for particular roles in society. It is about how we become more human (and therefore more free, in the truest sense of that word). This is a broader and a deeper question, but no less practical. Too often we have not been educating our humanity. We have been educating ourselves for doing rather than for being.

Today, in a world with instant access to Google, we rely on the electronic web to supply everything we need, from historical facts to word definitions and spellings as well as extended quotations. All of us who use a computer are aware of the shock of inner poverty that we suddenly feel when deprived (by a virus or other disaster) of our mental crutches even just for a day or a week. Plato is right: memory has been stripped from us, and all we possess is an external reminder of what we have lost, enabling us to pretend to a wisdom and an inner life we no longer possess in ourselves.13

Mathematics is the language of science-- but it is also the hidden structure behind art… and its basis is the invisible Logos of God.

the important thing, the real goal of study, is the ‘development of attention.’ Why? Because prayer consists of attention, and all worldly study is really a stretching of the soul towards prayer.

This is one of many reasons why it is such a shame to deprive children of exposure to the greatest writers in the English language. In the great writers one can see how words are charged with meaning.

If education is about the communication of values, or meaningful information, and of wisdom and of tradition, between persons and across generations, it is important to know that it can only take place in the heart; that is, in the center of the human person. A voice from the lungs is not enough to carry another along with the meaning of our words. The voice has to carry with it the warmth and living fire of the heart around which the lungs are wrapped.2

It is a modern mistake to think that great personalities can grow without being rooted in the rich soil of the past, in the memory of great deeds and in fidelity to promises made across the generations. Civilization is founded on covenants that cannot be broken without consequence.

The Christian story is both mythological and historical. That is because it concerns the historical incarnation of the One whom all myths represent. Thoth, Hermes, Apollo, and a hundred other gods are images of the Logos or Mediator whom Christians believe was born as a human child, died on a Cross, and rose from the dead two thousand years ago. 'By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God' (1 John 4:2-3). Nor does a 'literalist' belief in historical incarnation render imagination and the use of symbolism redundant - if anything it legitimizes them.

Heart Speaks Unto Heart. This motto of the Blessed John Henry Newman, adopted from St Francis de Sales, contains the essence of a ‘philosophy of communication,’ which is also a philosophy of education. If education is about the communication of values, or meaningful information, and of wisdom and of tradition, between persons and across generations, it is important to know that it can only take place in the heart; that is, in the center of the human person. A voice from the lungs is not enough to carry another along with the meaning of our words. The voice has to carry with it the warmth and living fire of the heart around which the lungs are wrapped.2

We find this more cosmic aspect of the Marian archetype expressed in the person of Galadriel’s own heavenly patroness, Elbereth, Queen of the Stars, who plays the role in Tolkien’s legendarium of transmitting light from the heavenly places. It is to Elbereth that the Elves sing their moving invocation: O Elbereth! Gilthoniel! We still remember, we who dwell In this far land beneath the trees, Thy Starlight on the Western seas. Tolkien would have been familiar from his childhood with one of the most popular Catholic hymns to the Virgin Mary, the tone and mood of which are markedly close to that of Tolkien’s to Elbereth (see L 213): Hail, Queen of Heaven, the ocean star, Guide of the wand’rer here below: Thrown on life’s surge, we claim thy care— Save us from peril and from woe. Mother of Christ, star of the sea, Pray for the wanderer, pray for me. Starlight on the sea: for Tolkien a particularly evocative combination, as we have seen. Light shining in darkness, representing the life, grace, and creative action of God, is the heart of Tolkien’s writing.

Modern culture has disenchanted the world by disenchanting numbers. For us, numbers are about quantity and control, not quality and contemplation. After Bacon, knowledge of numbers is a key to manipulation, not meditation. Numbers are only meaningful (like all raw materials that comprise the natural world) when we can do something with them. When we read of twelve tribes and twelve apostles and twelve gates and twelve angels, we typically perceive something spreadsheet-able. By contrast, in one of Caldecott’s most radical claims, he insists, “It is not simply that numbers can be used as symbols. Numbers have meaning—they are symbols. The symbolism is not always merely projected onto them by us; much of it is inherent in their nature” (p. 75). Numbers convey to well-ordered imaginations something of (in Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s metaphor) the inner design of the fabric of creation. The fact that the words “God said” appear ten times in the account of creation and that there are ten “words” in the Decalogue is not a random coincidence. The beautiful meaningfulness of a numberly world is most evident in the perception of harmony, whether in music, architecture, or physics. Called into being by a three-personed God, creation’s essential relationality is often evident in complex patterns that can be described mathematically. Sadly, as Caldecott laments, “our present education tends to eliminate the contemplative or qualitative dimension of mathematics altogether” (p. 55). The sense of transcendence that many (including mathematicians and musicians) experience when encountering beauty is often explained away by materialists as an illusion. Caldecott offers an explanation rooted in Christology. Since the Logos is love, and since all things are created through him and for him and are held together in him, we should expect the logic, the rationality, the intelligibility of the world to usher in the delight that beauty bestows. One

The goal of the quest is not to retrieve a treasure but to lose one: the Ring must be “unmade” in the fire of its forging, cast into Mount Doom under the very eye of the Dark Lord.

Tolkien wrote of Frodo’s failure that it reflected the fact that the power of Evil in the world cannot, in the end, be defeated by us on our own, however “good” we may try to be (L 191). By implicitly denying the heresy of Pelagianism (the idea that we can become good entirely by our own power), Tolkien is simply being realistic about our situation in a fallen world. This is not pessimism, however; for while we cannot save ourselves, we can yet be saved.

And so, when Gollum bites the Ring from Frodo’s finger and falls into the Fire, this is the consequence of Frodo’s earlier (and freer) decision to spare Gollum’s life. The salvation of the world, and of Frodo himself, is brought about in consequence of the pity and forgiveness that he had shown to Gollum earlier

The scene is a triumph of providence over fate, but also a triumph of mercy, in which free will, supported by grace, is fully vindicated.

Each of us is an allegory, embodying in a particular tale and clothed in the garments of time and place, universal truth and everlasting life

It is the memory of time that makes us old; remembering eternity makes us young again.

Language, grammar, syntax, and vocabulary exist for a purpose, and that purpose is revealed only in the search for truth. As Chesterton saw, it is the search for truth that keeps us sane, because it always brings us back to reality. And why is reality so important? It is what we are made for. Reality is the food of the soul. I

wise Socratic as he is, duly emphasizes. But he knows also that reason itself is far more than the nominally correct use of deductive rules. It involves the whole mind and its apprehension of the what outside: grass, and dogs, and rivers, and justice, and love. So the study of how to think is also a deepening of one’s first memories, or one’s first encounters with truth.

in the image and likeness of the three-Personed God? That is like asking what difference it will make to us if we keep in mind that a human being is made not for the processing of data, but for wisdom; not for the utilitarian satisfaction of appetite, but for love; not for the domination of nature, but for participation in it; not for the autonomy of an isolated self, but for communion. It is no accident that Caldecott has structured his plan for a true education upon the three ways of the Trivium, which themselves reflect the three primary axes of being, revealed by God:

To the Author of Revelation, Christ was not one more religious leader or prophet, of the kind one finds in every religion; he was the very Logos of God. He was like a comet that strikes the earth, an event of such overwhelming force that the whole history and substance of the world was changed forever. His advent, long prepared for, implanted Eternity within Time, giving history a center and an end. Like a magnet dropped into a field of iron filings, he oriented all things to himself, for he was their maker and master.

And most importantly of all, if education is to be effective it needs to be based on knowledge about the nature and purpose of human life—a true, or at least adequate, ‘anthropology.’ This knowledge is what the modern relativist thinks impossible.

We often talk about the “environmental movement,” or about a modern concern for the “environment.” It is worth noting that these terms are misleading, since they imply an opposition between humanity (or whichever species is under discussion) and its surroundings, reducing the rest of nature to a kind of backdrop—and at worst to a complex set of raw materials and mechanical forces.

The modern person feels himself to be disengaged from the world around him, rather than intrinsically related to it (by family, tribe, birthplace, vocation, and so forth). He is expected to forge his own destiny by an exercise of choice. He is concerned less with what is right than with what his rights are, or rather he grounds the former on the latter. The world for him is just a neutral space for his action, his free choice, and the greatest mysteries lie not outside but within himself.

If . . . the world is the effect of the Divine Word uttered at the beginning of time, then all of nature can be taken as a symbol of a supernatural reality. Everything that exists, in whatever mode, having its principle in the Divine Intellect, translates or represents that principle in its own manner and according to its own order of existence; and thus, from one order to another, all things are linked and correspond with each other so that they join together in a universal and total harmony which is like a reflection of the Divine Unity itself.

For Christians believed not only that the temporal world was an expression of God’s will and wisdom—in something like the way that pagans had believed that it was ruled and shaped by the gods, or that it was a shadow of the world of the Ideas—but that God had entered into that world, using its analogous resemblance to him in order to form it into a vessel for his actual presence.

education is not primarily about the acquisition of information. It is not even about the acquisition of ‘skills’ in the conventional sense, to equip us for particular roles in society. It is about how we become more human (and therefore more free, in the truest sense of that word). This is a broader and a deeper question, but no less practical. Too often we have not been educating our humanity. We have been educating ourselves for doing rather than for being.

Only in this way, by ordering the soul in harmony and giving it a sense of the meaning of proportion and relationship, can it be induced later to become fully rational, and to derive pleasure from the theoretic contemplation of ideas. The road to reason leads through the ordering of the soul, which implies the necessity of an education in love, in discernment, and in virtue.