Engineering, Beauty, and a Longing for the Infinite

In July 2019, I embarked upon a six-day excursion across Italy with 14 undergraduate students and three professors from Princeton University. The trip was part of a six-week summer course titled “Two Millennia of Structural Architecture in Italy.” Given the title, it should come as no surprise that the instructors were professors, not of architecture or history but of civil engineering.

But the course, sponsored by Princeton’s Institute for International and Regional Studies Global Seminar Program, was about much more than understanding how buildings were, and are, constructed. Too often, STEM students are understimulated in wonder, beauty, awe—the kind of childlike curiosity and enthusiasm for discovery that can incite great innovations in science and engineering. Studying beauty in the university has too long been relegated to departments of art or music or literature—but Sigrid Adriaenssens, Maria Garlock and Branko Glisic recognized the need to educate engineering students, too, about history, culture, people and art.

What was I—someone whose work lies at the intersection of sociology, theology and philosophy—doing on this trip? Our modern world is driven by a view of the person that sees us as essentially driven to dominate others, acquire endless personal gain or develop powerful technological skills. The aesthetic dimension of the human person—our desire for beauty—often seems to get left out of not only business and engineering but also much of the social sciences. Our disciplines present an implicit model of the human person as essentially a social product, a profit-maximizer or a great big machine.

But is that all we are?

Humans are born with a desire for beauty, but that desire, like any desire, needs to be nurtured—cultivated like a garden. Any good education must include an education in beauty; likewise, any field of knowledge that is stripped of the beauty of its object, whether that be a machine, a book or a person’s life, will be stripped of its mystery. As made clear in the experiences of famous scientists captured in the book by Marco Bersanelli and Mario Gargantini, From Galileo to Gell-Mann: The Wonder that Inspired the Greatest Scientists of All Time: In Their Own Words, studying the natural world sparks awe and wonder.

My training in the social sciences implicitly borrows methods of positivism or empiricism that do not just correspond to the human person in an integral fashion. Social sciences collect empirical data, but they also need and philosophy, theology and a language of beauty, wonder, awe and love. We are creatures who do things, but we are also creatures who contemplate things. We can’t live a flourishing life simply by satisfying our basic needs (even the need for surviving a motorcycle crash). Engineers and other specialists need to work together to build the products that serve our human nature, including our desire for awe and wonder.

One of the reasons universities structure learning across disciplines is that different ways of looking at the world train our minds in different ways: reading a text; proving a theorem in math; closely observing an object in its surrounding; pondering the meaning expressed by a piece of art; and building a bridge all require different types of cognitive skills, which need to be honed, tested and pruned.

And that was why we were in Italy. During the excursion, students learned about Italian architects including designers and icons of design: Brunelleschi, Canova, Ducati, Dainese, Nervi, Michelangelo, Palladio and Pisano. For six days, the students, professors, guides and I were immersed in the beauty of educating ourselves on the genius, risk-taking, and leaps of faith that create amazingly useful products—including motorcycles that dazzle us with their speed; airbags that protect us if we fall; churches that have inspired centuries of worshippers; and tobacco factories that were once abandoned but which are being repurposed for the technology of a new age.

During the many stops in our whirlwind tour of Bologna, Vicenza, Venice and Florence, we studied varied objects with the aid of experts. In Vicenza, for example, the art historian Guido Beltramini, an expert on the architect Andrea Palladio, took us to villas, bridges and a theater Palladio designed. We walked along the shop floor of the Ducati motorcycle factory, then met with Andrea Ferraresi, Ducati’s Design Director. The businessman Federico Minoli, who has been the CEO of Ducati, spent several days with the students, explaining what it takes to bring a great invention to the market.

We also visited the Dainese Archive, and met Lino Dainese, founder of the company and inventor of beautiful, comfortable and very safe motorcycle jackets, boots and even an exploding jacket airbag. Dainese, whose patented inventions have saved hundreds if not thousands of lives, insisted to the students that he’s not an engineer or a designer, which are fields he has not formally studied. But he is a lover of beauty and a lover of people. His passion is to save the lives of those so fascinated by the mystery of the infinite they would ride a motorcycle at 350 kilometers an hour, or up a treacherous mountain peak.

He made it clear that technological scientific discoveries are often made by people whose hearts long for the infinite. And along with the others we met, he showed us that the buildings, objects of art and machines we use every day came about through a creative genius that integrates beauty and function. But learning the biography of great inventors further showed the class that no creative genius exists in a vacuum. Even they make mistakes and need help from others.

Trips such as this provide a much-needed opportunity to bring together all the ways our minds work and to learn from each other’s observations. Watching professors “geek out” about all the complex mathematics that went into building the structures we visited was a person-to-person way of communicating the joy of scientific innovation.

As Branko Glisic kept pointing out, something can’t be beautiful if it doesn’t work. A bridge that looks nice and collapses never was beautiful in the first place. Students found beauty not only in perfection, but in an abandoned tobacco factory built by Pier Luigi Nervi in Bologna now being repurposed as a meteorological center. Seeing the millennia of structures being made out of earlier structures from classical, Renaissance and, now, modern architecture inspired wonder in us at human ingenuity that can preserve traditions of beauty while also adapting existing structures to new purposes.

Without educating all forms of knowledge toward mutual coherence, without standing in a tradition of thinking and being, our varied emotions, thoughts, expressions and even the things we create in a laboratory don’t add up to anything more than noise. Fleeting sensory pleasures or tools that badly fit the needs of humans don’t lead to human flourishing.

Connecting STEM and the liberal arts is crucial for the simple reason that, as one student wrote, “whether created as monuments to God, places to live and entertain, or ways to travel, structures are inevitably built for humans to enjoy.”

A liberal arts education is supposed to make us free. Modern education can’t just be focused on productivity but must engage with the core questions of truth, beauty and the good across all fields. Universities exist to help the young understand the past, preserve what’s good from it, discover new forms of knowledge and know how to apply that knowledge for the human good. Integrating the study of engineering and beauty will not only help students be more creative and take risks; it will help them resist the reduction of the human person to merely an object buffered from the transcendent.

Education in all fields of knowledge—including science and engineering—should be understood as part of educating the universal human longing for the infinite.

This article was originally published at the Scientific American.

Already and Not Yet

On Palm Sunday 2021, I sank into a pew at St. Mary of the Assumption Catholic Church in Ft. Worth, Texas, my heart heavy with grief. The day before, I had had breakfast with a former student, James. He revealed that his father—a successful businessman, evangelical Christian, and well-known philanthropist—had committed suicide in July 2020. 

The news of yet another suicide left me feeling despondent. On Palm Sunday, I did not feel God's love. Instead, I was asking God how he could let so many tragedies happen. My thoughts and emotions left me unable to pray. As I struggled to listen attentively to the long Palm Sunday readings of the passion of Jesus, I began to picture the agony in the garden, where Jesus called out to his father to take this suffering from him, if he willed it.

Spurred by Jesus’s anguished petitions, I cried out in my heart, “Why Lord, do you let these things happen? How much more suffering must this world endure? When, Lord, are you coming again?”

And in my heart I heard, “I’m already right here with you.”

I stared at the crucifix—the ultimate sign of love—hanging behind the altar. Then I looked one by one at the stations of the cross. Word and image united to move my heart to remember that Jesus is with us in our pain. He suffered so we can be redeemed.

But somehow that didn’t feel satisfying. I thought, “That’s not good enough!”

Then I heard, “You need to be my hands and my feet to the suffering.”

My heart of stone melted. I realized that I can’t walk into Mass demanding that God fix my problems the way I see fit. I walk into Mass to receive his love, so that I can respond with faith to whatever problems may come my way. Liturgy isn’t a magical rite that gives us godlike power to manipulate the world with a foolproof plan of action. Liturgy is an act of worship that reminds us we are creatures who depend on a loving God. Liturgy speaks to our broken hearts, to our grief, anger, and confusion, and brings us into dialogue with Jesus.

Recently, while teaching Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s book The Spirit of the Liturgy, I was reminded that because of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, the chasm between heaven and earth has been broken open. The liturgy is a kind of work through which God makes his dwelling in the world. The liturgy is one powerful way to see our earthly dramas and tragedies as part of a larger narrative, one that reminds us God has made a covenant of love with us. Participation in the liturgy can help us heal our wounds.

As Benedict XVI writes, “creation exists to be a place for the covenant that God wants to make with man . . . creation, history and worship are in a relationship of reciprocity.” We live in an earthly reality, but we are also journeying toward our final fulfillment, which has already been inaugurated by the coming of Christ. The liturgy fulfills our desires to experience God here and now, while also preparing us for greater communion with God to come. Worship anticipates the completion of creation.

The liturgy is therefore not an escape from reality, but an anticipation of what we were created to become—and therefore a participation in a deeper reality. Liturgy becomes a symbol of all of life, a life we live, as Benedict said, “already and not yet.”

The liturgy, Benedict XVI writes, represents the drama of God's departure and his return, what he calls “a kind of turning around of exitus and reditus.” Through the liturgy I participated in on Palm Sunday, I was reminded that being near suffering is an invitation to journey in this circle of exitus and reditus. Liturgy is an embodied and mysterious reminder of the covenant of love to which God calls us. When the news cycle and our personal lives are pulling us toward acts of despair, the liturgy can renew our hope in God’s promises. Liturgy can strengthen our love so we can be the hands and feet to wounded friends and neighbors in this wounded nation.

We who are dedicated to a robust civil society must ask ourselves: What response do we have for the many thousands of those who struggling with mental illness and fear during COVID? How we can respond to the tragedy of suicide with hope for those who feel hopeless?

One response: As we continue to address COVID risks and begin to reopen our schools and public institutions, we must do all we can to bring the faithful back to liturgy in person, where anguished hearts can renew their covenant with a God whose promises are already, and also not yet, coming true.

Margarita Mooney Clayton is associate professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and founder and executive director of Scala Foundation. This article was originally published at First Things,

Why Choose Mystery Over Ideology?

When I took a wrong turn while driving with students in Rhode Island in the summer of 2019, we found ourselves driving over a bridge clouded in fog, seemingly going into nowhere. When we came out of the fog, I tried to make a U-turn and ended up going around several jughandles before getting back on the same foggy bridge going the other direction.

Back in our classroom at Portsmouth Abbey and School in Rhode Island, students drew an image of a car going over a bridge into the fog to represent Luigi Giussani’s educational philosophy as described in his book The Risk of Education. Giussani paints a picture of education as an adventure in which we start off our journey feeling as if our inner light is clouded in fog, but we have faith that we can reach certainty about our questions. Reaching certainty then leads us to ask other questions, and we go into the fog again, with confidence that our journey is not in vain.

For the past five summers, I’ve gathered with students through a Scala Foundation program to ponder contemporary challenges in education. For many students, schooling has become so-called strategic learning—studying for a certain grade on a test. Other students gravitate toward activism—learning for the sake of changing the world.

Giussani’s writings on education become memorable precisely because they evoke reactions whereby students experience precisely what they’ve been missing in education—curiosity and questioning. Just like the sense of adventurous joy we felt as we crossed the foggy bridge in Rhode Island, Giussani sparks my students’ imagination. Reading Giussani together, it’s like we have set off into the fog, riding together, getting excited about what we learned, and then turning around, ready for more.

Giussani’s emphasis on mystery is one idea that seems “relevant” to students. What “problem” does the notion of mystery solve for them? Giussani unpacks for students just why a so-called problem-solving approach to education, where all knowledge must have relevance to change this world, has unintended consequences. What students are missing in education today are awe, curiosity, and contemplation. The beginning of education is not changing the world, but being attentive to all of reality, including its symbolic dimension.

Why has our modern system of education become obsessed with problem-solving to the detriment of a contemplative view of education? Could it be possible that we are so obsessed with transforming the world that we’ve lost the joyous adventure of forming the inner dynamism of young people to lovelearning?

Central to Giussani’s vision of education is his view that reality—both human nature and the things we create with knowledge—has a symbolic dimension. As Giussani writes, human reason is not only about discovering causal laws, but our reason looks at reality as a sign: “Our nature senses that what it experiences, what it has at hand, refers to something else. We have called this the ‘vanishing point.’ It is the vanishing point that exists in every human experience; that is, a point that does not close, but rather refers beyond.”

For Giussani, humans are beings who live in a particular time and history. Yet we also have a cosmic origin and final end of communion with God. That’s why Giussani emphasizes that education has to form young people in reason and faith, science and mystery, action and contemplation.

Students come to my seminars to ponder questions like: How does a liberal arts education form us as integral persons—mind, body, and soul? What is poetic knowledge, and how is it related to scientific and conceptual knowledge?

Jacques Maritain’s work Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, delivered as a series of lectures in the spring of 1952, is both history of art and philosophy of humanity. Maritain’s Creative Intuition is an exploration into the spiritual preconscious from which stems poetic knowledge that helps unite beauty, truth, and goodness. As with his other, perhaps better-known works, Maritain’s exploration of art and poetry points to a similar conclusion: there is a part of the human person that is an irreducible mystery where the encounter with God happens, but that inner element of us is profoundly shaped by the practical intellect through which works of art and poetry are created.

One of Maritain’s main claims is essentially one about intellectual history and culture: poetic knowledge has been forgotten. For many, only the scientific method is ever objective, whereas literature, poetry, art, and other forms of beauty can be nothing but subjective.

Maritain aims to restore the relationship between reason and beauty, stating, “Reason does not only consist of its conscious logical tools and manifestations, nor does the will consist only of its deliberate conscious determinations. Far beneath the sunlit surface thronged with explicit concepts and judgments, words and expressed resolutions or movements of the will, are the sources of knowledge and creativity, of love and supra-sensuous desires, hidden in the primordial translucid night of the intimate vitality of the soul.”

As part of our rational nature, therefore, art and poetry are capacities to be honed, refined, reflected on, growing gradually toward perfection. Because art and poetry bring new objects into the world, Maritain argues they form part of the practical rather than the speculative intellect: knowing for the sake of action, of bringing something into existence. Participating in art and poetry forms our identity and subjectivity into beings who have stable inner qualities that enable us to use our many human capacities for the good.

In his book Education at the Crossroads, Maritain directly engages with perhaps the most influential philosopher in American education: John Dewey. For Dewey, the scientific experiment is the only road to objective truth. In A Common Faith, Dewey wrote, “There is but one sure road of access to truth—the road of patient, cooperative inquiry operating by means of observation, experiment, record and controlled reflection.” Dewey called his approach to knowledge nothing less than a “a revolution in the seat of intellectual authority.”

Religious creeds, which used to be thought of as indicating objective knowledge, must be separated for Dewey from religious experience. Religious values are important to democracy, but “their identification with the creeds and cults of religions must be dissolved.”

Observing European politics in the first half of twentieth century, the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce feared that reducing values to subjectivity and enshrining only science as true quickly leads to scientism, a reduction of all truth to the scientifically verifiable. The most powerful in society are those who claim the mantle of scientific truth. As he wrote, once rendered subjective, every argument about values becomes seen as “merely ideology” and “an instrument of power.” Without shared objective values, a greater separation between elites and the masses emerges. Our social fabric tears.

Maritain warned that the downstream impact of Dewey’s philosophy, which negates contemplative truth, is a culture that will end in a “a stony positivist or technocratic denial of the objective value of any spiritual need.”

Are we surprised that today so many students today lack meaning, purpose, and hope?

One poorly understood aspect of this crisis of meaning is the neglect of the relationship between beauty, truth, and virtuous living. At my seminars, students are eager to talk about how to recover poetic knowledge alongside scientific knowledge (scientific method) and conceptual knowledge (abstractions, like laws, procedures, rules).

Experiences of beauty awaken our desire to know the splendour of the truth and prepare us to enter into virtuous relationships characterized by self-gift.

Understanding poetic knowledge as a virtue of the intellect helps explain why education must expose students to beauty. Beauty is poorly understood in much of education and culture as just one more form of self-expression rather than a form of self-transcendence. The classical understanding of beauty was that experiences of beauty awaken our desire to know the splendour of the truth and prepare us to enter into virtuous relationships characterized by self-gift.

Yet many educational institutions have forgotten beauty. Our technological society provides endless sources of entertainment that are like junk food: images and soundbites momentarily satisfy a craving to experience something, but then leave people with a deeper need for true nourishment for the soul.

The result of the neglect of objective beauty in education and culture is that much of our schooling stops at teaching us how to manipulate the world. Most educators, administrators, and policy-makers have lost sight of the power of beauty to draw students into contemplation of beauty and truth in ways that give them meaning, purpose, and hope.

In my recent book, The Love of Learning: Seven Dialogues on the Liberal Arts, I ponder the crisis in modern education with seven scholars, all of whom practice a life-giving form of liberal arts education.

In one dialogue, George Harne, a professor of music, former president of Magdalene College, and now dean of the University of St. Thomas–Houston, explains, “There is an irreducible dimension to poetry, as there is to life. We want students to recognize through liberal learning that sometimes you cannot cross all the ‘t’s and dot all the ‘i’s. There are parts of life that are irreducible in their complexity; the process of understanding life is always unfinished. Poetry can prepare us to encounter the mysterious in life, and it can inoculate us against certain ideologies that claim to explain and control everything.”

Without experiences of beauty to draw us into contemplation, education risks becoming purely cognitive and functional and culture becomes desiccated.

In another chapter of my book, the mathematical physicist Carlo Lancellotti says, “We live in a crisis of abstraction. We think that once we have analyzed things, that’s all there is, that the idea is exhausted by our analysis. Everything gets filtered through some kind of pre-prepared abstract screen. Experience is replaced by our abstract explanations of experience. What is really missing for so many today is the perception of beauty, and beauty as an opening to the mystery of God.”

Humans are made for something more than utility, problem-solving, and relevance. Beauty is the door that opens onto that greater reality. Without experiences of beauty to draw us into contemplation, education risks becoming purely cognitive and functional and culture becomes desiccated. What we learn is rendered as a set of techniques for manipulating the natural world (natural sciences) and our fellow human beings (ideologically tainted social sciences and humanities). We lack shared stories that unite us.

Beauty is the spark of liberal arts education and scientific creativity. Beauty draws us out of ourselves, arrests our attention, and leads us to contemplate our world, the people around us, and ultimately God. Beauty is the glimmer, the gleam of being. Beauty awakens our hearts to the splendour of being alive and the desire to know reality in its fullness and complexity.

The void left by the denigration of beauty and a classical liberal arts education is directing more and more people to “woke” social justice activism or alt-right movements because those movements offer them meaning, purpose, and hope, as well as community and a sense of belonging. Others burn out psychologically or resort to social isolation because trust and intimacy are hard to experience. Yet others resort to drugs, pornography, or another temporary pleasure to fill the void. Still others pursue ambitious and demanding careers without reflecting on how they should live or why they exist to begin with. The result is skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide. Educational institutions have not succeeded in addressing these problems, leading many people to seek alternatives to feed their minds and souls.

The students I teach are dying to return to learning as a mysterious adventure. Social justice activism, for instance, offers this adventure, but if our social and political commitments end up reducing our contemplative side to purely subjective experiences, then we have—perhaps unwittingly—adopted an underlying view of the person and of reality that has eradicated mystery.

If all knowledge is a tool to change the world, then man, not God, is at the centre of reality. Anything at all is possible, but nothing is true. For today’s generation, as for the students Giussani taught, the idea that our scientific knowledge can create any reality we want with no limitation rings hollow. Ideologies abound because soundbites promise simple explanations. But ideology never produces a well-rounded human person—without which, Guissani warned, social or political good cannot come about.

Beauty is the glimmer, the gleam of being.

As Giussani wrote, “If we consider our nature to be the image of the mystery that made us, to be participation in this mystery, and if we understand that this mystery is mercy and compassion, then we will try to practice mercy, compassion, and fraternity as our very nature whatever the effort involved.”

Integral human formation must recover education in beauty as the seed to sow the fertile ground to cultivate the fruits of intellectual virtue, restore the love of learning, and bring joy and trust into friendships, all the while retaining the personal discipline required to master and prudentially use knowledge.

My students often ask, What can unite us socially and politically? I respond that in order to reunite as a society, we have to reunite beauty, truth, and goodness. We have to choose mystery over ideology.

Article originally published by Comment Magazine.