I would like to encourage all of you to look at the blog of Ron Gaudio. Ron is a student in the Pontifex University Master of Sacred Arts program. He told me that what he is learning with us is enriching the content of his blog.
His blog is called The Socratic Journey of Faith and Reason - socratesjourney.org - and his goal is to highlight how philosophy and divine revelation, as encapsulated by the Church, are combined to create a greater understanding of the world around us and the basis of Western civilization.
His extended piece on the life and influence of Pythagoras is here, and a short excerpt follows:
Pythagoras’s journey really started with a search for beauty and led him to the divine. The Greeks recognized not only beauty in music and art, but in the cosmos and nature as well. They all came up with various explanations for beauty, where Pythagoras happened to find the mathematical basis for it. For Pythagoras and many other Greek philosophers, the beauty of the cosmos reflected not only a harmonious order but divinity itself. That is why they were also a community that worshipped.
Pythagoras’s ideas would go on to affect not only philosophy and mathematics, but art and architecture, especially in the Middle Ages. Much of Gothic art and architecture was based on this idea of harmonious proportion.19 The Roman architect Vitruvius (85 BC to 15 AD) was heavily influenced by these ideas as well as the 16th-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio. Through Palladio, Pythagoras’s legacy reached even to the United States, being responsible for the architectural beauty of Monticello, Harvard Hall, and the Capitol Building.
Speaking of Harvard Hall, one of the buildings below was designed with the principle of harmonious proportion and one wasn’t. Can you guess which is which and do you think that harmonious proportion has anything to do with beauty? The building on top is a modern office building and the one on the bottom is Harvard Hall.
