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Composed: A timeless way of living. A podcast for women exploring living patterns of virtue, craft, community, and delight, that carry enduring wisdom into modern life.
This is Christine Perrin, host of A Timeless Way of Living, a podcast of the Humanitas Institute that explores living patterns of virtue, craft, community, and delight, and draws the classical tradition into contemporary times. Welcome to Composed and Forged.
Brian Williams:And welcome to Forged and Composed.
Christine Perrin:We're really happy to be here together, getting
Brian Williams:to have a conversation. Absolutely.
Christine Perrin:We've been listening to each other's conversations, and now we're gonna have one ourselves. Yeah. But today, I'm the interviewer, and Brian is the interviewee. And we are going to talk about beauty, but also the way that it's instantiated here at Templeton Hall. One of the things that I want to do is to just share with people what you've done, and the way it's fallen upon me, the way it feels to be here, so that they can do likewise.
Christine Perrin:So I wanted to ask you a little bit about what you've done here.
Brian Williams:That's great. Well, I might ask you a little bit about, you know, your experience of being here because I'm living it from the inside having designed it and and watched it, be built, but you are the kind of person we built it for, to somebody to come in anew and fresh and experience it.
Christine Perrin:And I will just say that, you know, we on this podcast about Christopher Alexander and the quality without a name, which is a space that creates a feeling of wholeness, aliveness, integrity. And that is how I feel in this place. I've been here now a handful of times. I've spent a weekend here. And it's the parts fit with each other.
Christine Perrin:But I feel the hand of human being and the imagination of a human being making them. It feels good to be intimate, feels human. I can have a conversation in any number of places that either is a group conversation or an intimate conversation, or it could be a presentation that I'm giving or receiving. So it has a lot of multiplicity, variety. But then it also has intimacy and very different kinds of uses.
Christine Perrin:But the parts feel harmonious. I never am in a place where something in that place doesn't fit or seems not to acknowledge me. And I I just wonder what you how did you get started? What got your imagination going?
Brian Williams:I'll just comment on that first. You know, one of the defining properties of beauty in the medieval era that that really comes from both Aristotle and then through Aquinas is harmony of the parts. And that was the mantra in my head the whole time here. Harmony of the parts, harmony of the parts. I care about the details in everything.
Brian Williams:I care about the details in everything we do in a big project, in place settings at a banquet, in what's on the walls, what's in the bathrooms here. I care about the details, but then I want those details to harmonize so that you do feel like you are walking through in a dwelling and integrated space. And I just learned that, I I think maybe intuitively, but certainly learned it from the tradition, that idea of the harmony of the parts, because I didn't want one space to be the beauty room, or the room where, oh, this room is well designed, but then you you walk out into a space that feels like sterile and industrial, and so the building was designed for multiple purposes, different spaces for different uses. Obviously seminar spaces and faculty offices and faculty common rooms and student common rooms and a recital hall and an art gallery and a quad. All of those have different uses, but I wanted it to feel like you were walking through one integrated whole no matter what space you were in.
Brian Williams:One of our challenges here with this building, as you know, is that half of this building is a manor home designed in the 1920s. So it was designed as a single residence manor home by these great local architects Tilden Register and Pepper, who were local boys and then went to the Beaux Arts in Paris and came back and opened their architectural firm here. So when we were looking for a home for the Templeton Honors College, which the college and my previous deans have wanted for twenty five years, we wanted something that signaled permanence and tradition and solidity. And so this old manor home was designed in a kind of French provincial, kind of country home or a kind of Tudor country home with stone and wood, and so it felt like a natural home for the Honors College, but it was just too small for everything that we wanted. So then we tripled the footprint on the backside by adding on a reception hall, a recital hall, the art gallery, seminar rooms, and faculty offices.
Brian Williams:But that was the real challenge initially to design a new building to cohere with an old building because I absolutely hate I'll just say it I hate it when I see new additions to old buildings and it just looks like two completely different buildings that were slammed together and and glued on the edges, right? One was designed in one period by one architect, and then a new architect comes along and says, well, I'm gonna design what I wanna design, and we'll just put them together and hope nobody notices. I I hate that. Remuddling. Yeah.
Brian Williams:Exactly. And so with this building, I made sure that our architects knew from the very beginning that we wanted the new building to just flow seamlessly from the old building so that when you looked at it from the air or when you walked around the building, you wouldn't be able to tell where the old building started and and ended in the new building started. And that required a lot of work. I mean, that required saying no to lots of the architect's designs. You know, they kept pitching me ideas, and I said no because that does not fit with the architectural style of the original building and is not nodding to the the tradition that I want to to nod to and acknowledge.
Brian Williams:It also meant that when we were looking at, field stones for the new building, because the old building is covered with field stones, I looked at a dozen different samples of big field stones, and then when we looked at the mortar to put between the field stones, I, with the chief architect, walked around the old building with probably 25 different shades of pink and peach colored, trying to find mortar new mortar that would match the old mortar as closely as possible. And that just means you're trying to attend to the details for the sake of the harmony of the parts, but when you have that, when you put out that effort and then somebody walks up to it, they don't have the they don't have the tension and anxiety inside that you feel when a space doesn't work or what you feel when a space, a new space and an old space don't cohere or when a when a piece of music doesn't work. You feel it before you know it, right? It's that sense that my emotions and body are responding to this lack of harmony. But then when you walk up to a space that works, you feel I think you feel it in your body relaxing.
Brian Williams:You feel you don't feel that tension. You feel yourself breathing deeply. And so that's what we were going for. I'll tell you one story. When I used to teach aesthetics at, Care Paravel Latin School in Topeka, Kansas, we did a whole semester on aesthetics and a theology of beauty.
Brian Williams:And most of my students would come into the class on day one with some, you know, shallow version of beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And so my brother had a friend who used to work for a recording company, a record company, and he had put together a demo of all, no, a collection of all the worst demos they had ever received, and it was hilarious. And these were bad. These were either people who couldn't sing, music that was bad, or lyrics that were laughable. And so I would pick two or three of these songs for my students, and I would play them at full volume in the in the class, and every every time I did this semester after semester, you would see them kind of move into the fetal position in their desks.
Brian Williams:They would they would they would crunch up, they would hold themselves tight, they they would grimace, they'd have this make it stop kind of feeling, right? And I would just let it go for a while, and then I would immediately switch to Modislav Rostepovich playing Bach's cello suite number one. Every single semester, there was an audible gasp or sigh in the room, and then I just watched people's bodies unfold and relax. And I would stop it after a while and I would say, What just happened to you? What just happened to you is the experience of beauty.
Brian Williams:Now let's try to name it and think about it, and that would be the beginning of our semester then, right? So when with this building, I had that experience in mind. I wanted people to have the same experience walking into this building that my students used to have when I would play them Bach's cello suite after the, you know, egregiously painful music I had subjected them to.
Christine Perrin:What a wonderful lesson that is. I I think it's useful for people when I teach them poetry to read some bad poems in a similar fashion and then to talk about what makes them bad. But so many questions arise out of what the things you've just said. First of all, I think it's very hard for people to both focus on details and think about the harmonious whole, even if you know those are categories to do both strikes me as unusual. Then I would also say, you're not an architect.
Christine Perrin:You haven't studied architecture. So what gives one the confidence? And I think this is something that Christopher Alexander was getting at that you've articulated very well. But what gives someone the confidence to have an opinion about something that they're not an expert on, particularly when it's going to affect many people, and it's spending a lot of money? Another question, that's two so far.
Christine Perrin:And then thirdly, I really love the territory that you're taking us into about beauty, having objective qualities, and not simply being in the eye of the beholder, such that we cannot really ever talk about it, we can't agree on it, and it has no transcendent value. So anyway, let's start with a concrete
Brian Williams:and Yeah. The make our first thing, you know, a lack of expertise has never stopped me from having an opinion on anything. So I think sometimes we feel like if I'm not an expert, I really shouldn't have an opinion on it. I And just don't think it's true. I mean, I'm a human person who's lived in my body, who has has lived in spaces his whole life, obviously, like like any of us.
Brian Williams:And, you know, I don't know. My dad was a musician and music professor, so I was probably attuned to the aesthetics of things early or maybe inherited that. But even as a kid, I I cared about what my room was like.
Christine Perrin:Me too.
Brian Williams:You know? And so That's what
Christine Perrin:I asked for for Christmas.
Brian Williams:Is that right?
Christine Perrin:Like, you know, wallpaper or Yeah. Okay. Something that I could make it that much.
Brian Williams:Yeah. I've just always been fascinated with beauty and and aesthetics, I have to say. So, you know, as a as a as a teenager growing up and being, you know, kind of a punk kid, my room had a certain vibe to it, but it had a vibe. I mean, walked into my room and I had a vibe. My my the way I dressed had a vibe.
Brian Williams:My my graffitied car had a vibe, you know? And so I don't I never I just felt natural to, I I would say, have my physical space reflect myself or kind of be not an extension of me, that sounds a little too solipsistic, but to not impose my will upon my space, I don't think, but like to create a space, to create a space in which I wanted to live. And so when I used to own a coffee bar, same thing. I there I had a space to work with, and so back in the nineties when we had this coffee bar, we designed it to be a humane, beautiful space within which people would want to sit and have a have a real conversation with beautiful art on the walls, sipping good coffee, you know, with good music. And so I think part of that I'll say, Christine, before I before I go on, part of that is also my desire to create hospitable spaces.
Brian Williams:I grew up not only with a father who was a musician, but a father and a mother who were consummate hosts. And and so my mom was a Kansas farm girl, but mom cared about beauty and our home wasn't wasn't opulent by any stretch of the imagination, but it was ordered. And we had just hundreds, if not thousands of people into our home at our dining table, having Heather Williams cooking and hosting people. And so I grew up. I've got their DNA and I saw them do that.
Brian Williams:And so I think when I have created spaces, whether my coffee bar, you know, thirty plus years ago or this space, I thought or my classroom. I did the same thing with my classroom. I I had art up on the walls. I had a bunch of whiteboards in a classroom I inherited, and so I bought curtain rods and like like beautiful curtains or shower curtains, and I would close them over those whiteboards so we didn't have to look at them, didn't we didn't need them, and then when we needed the whiteboard, I would open the curtains and then we could use the whiteboard, right? Also trying to create even in my classroom a space within which a space in which human persons would want to live, right?
Brian Williams:I mean how many classrooms have I been in like you that feel like a sterile doctor's examination room? Right? And what do you want to do in a sterile doctor's examination room? Get out of it as quickly as you can. You don't decorate your front room like that or your dining room like that and the doctor's office fine, but then so many classrooms that I've sat in over the years have also felt like sterile doctor's examination rooms, and I just didn't want that.
Brian Williams:Want that.
Christine Perrin:Can we take a little jaunt right there? Yeah, Because this is huge for me as a teacher. I have sought out spaces to teach in that communicated what we were doing in that room. And there are so few that exist, you know, and eventually the administration would just shut me down. Like, I would I would have to make these backroom deals to use this room, you know, for this space.
Christine Perrin:But what strikes me too is that it's not about money. I mean, even what you're saying about the curtains over the whiteboards, like, they probably didn't even look that good. But it was human. It was built, and it was cultural, it was shaping, it was I
Brian Williams:think I spent $20 on curtain rods and curtains, and you know, I mean, and one of the ones I had was a shower curtain because it was the best thing I could find at the price, but it was this beautiful, like, gold inlay stuff, and it was really nice, but it was way better than just looking at a, you know, what six by three foot white rectangle on my wall, which didn't make any sense functional, but not but not beautiful. And so I wanted a view. I wanted to see beauty and then be able to use the function.
Christine Perrin:Well, I have often thought, you know, I've gone to we've all been to St. John's College, right? And they have these old oval tables and round tables that are very old wood. Their space is lovely, but it's in no way luxurious, and it doesn't cost more to do that than it does to buy those stupid individual desks all facing the front of the classroom. And so then you say, well, it's time for us to discuss.
Christine Perrin:No, it's not. It's time for you at the front to pontificate. And St. John's knew that's not gonna work for the style of talking.
Brian Williams:That's right. The pedagogy won. I mean, and here's, you know, there's this very famous line from Churchill in a short speech he delivered at the end of World War two when they were thinking about redesigning the houses of parliament, which to even say that sounds ludicrous, but they were thinking about redesigning parliament, in a more modern style, so if it modern sensibilities, quote unquote. And he insisted on keeping, parliament facing each other in the kind of stately rooms that it is that we know it to be. And he said, first, we shape our buildings and afterwards they shape us.
Brian Williams:And I kept that in mind too, and I've always thought that a room ought to reflect the the the activities that go on in that room. Right? And and so if it's a classroom, it ought to reflect what's going on in that classroom. It's the same reason that for my university classes I have a dress code. My students have to come in business casual to my university classrooms, I don't let them wear sweats and slippers, And I tell them, hey, sweats and slippers and cut off jeans are fine if you're playing, you know, sitting on your couch, eating Doritos, playing video games, or sitting in the backyard, but not when you're coming together with other human persons to discuss some of the greatest ideas, with some of the most beautiful works of art and literature and philosophy ever written.
Brian Williams:We ought to embody that in how we comport ourselves and how we adorn ourselves. And the room ought to reflect that too. It ought to reflect the seriousness and significance of what's going on in that space.
Christine Perrin:And as you said earlier, the hospitality, the invitation, and the kinds of activities we're doing. And I do think that as time has gone on, in classical education, we've had the chance to absorb a greater and greater amount, right? So it began as content, right? Like, you need to read these books. And then slowly we remembered, oh, there's people involved, and it should be tailored to them.
Christine Perrin:And now it seems like maybe we're ready to think about spaces, and what kind of spaces people can thrive in. And I I'm interested in hearing why you think this is not just about elitism or wealth, or some kind of condescending privilege that, requires a certain echelon of person.
Brian Williams:Because human beings care about beauty. Full stop. I don't care where you are in the world. I don't care who you are. I don't care your your income whatsoever.
Brian Williams:This is this is not a class thing. This is not a status thing whatsoever. We care about beauty. I mean, I've been to those I've been to the, you know, the prehistoric caves in Southern France, right, where you see a red hand on the wall or, you know, brown bison. This served no functional purpose.
Brian Williams:They were living in caves and they were beautifying them. A couple years ago, I was in the hills around Medellin, Colombia with my son's soccer team playing soccer with really street kids on dirt soccer patches where the literally the drug lord's house was overlooking the soccer pitch. And these were people who had been escape who had escaped drug violence and civil war. Houses literally precariously, I don't even say houses, I mean these were spaces they had created with boards. But you'd find them painted red and green.
Brian Williams:You'd find literally shards of a broken stained glass window hung up in the light. You'd see plants that had been set out in pots of different colors. Why? Because they were beautifying their space. Why?
Brian Williams:Because they're human and made in the image of a God who creates and who gives us beauty and is beauty himself. And so I think our desire for beauty is really a desire for the God who is beautiful, that stands behind beauty. Every shard of beauty in the world is kind of a refraction of the God who is beautiful. So we're drawn to those things as we were made to be drawn to God. And so when I'm talking about making space hospitable, hospitality is not a class thing, hospitality is a human thing.
Brian Williams:When I'm talking about making a space beautiful, I'm not talking about, opulence, I'm not talking about wealth, I'm talking about using what you have to make this space humane and beautiful. I mean, was William Morris's vision too in the late nineteenth century. William Morris, somebody people might know, who really began the arts and crafts movement in the late nineteenth century in the age of industrialization because he wanted to ensure that people's homes could still be beautiful. And so his concern and his mantra was that things can be both useful and beautiful. And so my wife and I love William Morris.
Brian Williams:She's an art teacher. It's one of her mantras, and she teaches it. It's one of my visions for this space. We have we have two rugs in the building here, which are William Morris designs, as I kind of nod to our our man in the arts and crafts movement. But so much of what we did in this building, so much of the work we put out to get beautiful furniture, beautiful bookshelves, I was able to do that by being resourceful and saving, I'll just say, tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars over our original furniture budget because what I bought was not only reusing old pieces of furniture, not only, you know, did I have that I was I able to avoid stocking the world with more IKEA particleboard, but I was able to create and and acquire beautiful pieces that gave it a kind of age and history and gravitas it wouldn't otherwise have had, but this the things we bought are are human pieces, humanly made pieces, obviously carved by hand, like we're sitting at a table that has carvings all the way around it, and a person with a hammer and chisel made this, these leaf designs, and it presences that person embedded in history.
Brian Williams:We don't know their name, we don't know their face, but neither will people know my name and face in a hundred years who indwell this building after me. But the building will be here, and it will still be a humane space nurturing hospitality for generations of students and professors after me. And that's that's part of that hospitable gift, if you will, to time and to the the people come after us in the ages.
Christine Perrin:That's a really lovely thought, thinking about the future and how they'll inhabit the present. It strikes me a couple of things. One is that whenever you make a beautiful object, it has its own story, because it doesn't just get thrown away. It doesn't become obsolete. Mean, there have been stories like the Red Violin and things like that where, or Stradivarius, can follow a beautiful object like this table or your desk or the wardrobes in here, or the pieces of art, that because they were made so carefully and well, suddenly they become almost like a character in the story.
Brian Williams:Oh, they do. Right? Because they endure, and they have their own history. So many of these pieces, I didn't I didn't buy any of them from the person who made them. I probably didn't buy any of them from the original owner.
Brian Williams:I mean, of these are several 100 a couple 100 years old, and so you know they have been passed down. Like the table we're sitting at, at some point in time somebody brought it over from Belgium. My desk, at some point in time somebody brought it over from England. The cabinet behind me, at some point in time somebody brought it over from Ireland. Now I bought all of these either on Facebook Marketplace or eBay or other sites like that, so I wasn't going to like high end dealers, I was finding these from real people, maybe who somebody in the family died, estate sales, and I was just slowly collecting these, putting them in storage units for for two or three years while we were waiting on this building to be finished, and so these have store and sometimes I did buy them from people, in whose family these had been for for a couple generations.
Brian Williams:So that was always fun. If I found somebody on Facebook marketplace saying my, you know, my grandfather died, this was his desk, it doesn't fit what we're doing right now, but let me tell you where it came from and what happened to this. So I have a few of those. I bought faculty desk for my faculty, and it was fun to get some of those living stories from people if I could.
Christine Perrin:That's remarkable. I think another question I have is, we've talked about that aesthetic sense, we've talked about hospitality and maybe imagination and ingenuity, but where did you acquire just the sheer discipline to let a thing take its time? Because I mean, I'm just thinking about my own household. And, you know, of course, there are so many obstacles. There's money, and there's, you know, you've got to solve a problem, and all these things, and so often I don't have the discipline that it takes to do a thing well.
Christine Perrin:I think maybe I've done things well once or twice in my life.
Brian Williams:Come on. You you have written you just published a new book of poetry.
Christine Perrin:Well, let's I'm just so
Brian Williams:I'm just saying, but, like like, writing poems, that's a long, slow process. Writing, I don't know how many poems are in your new collection, but a lot. And that's a long, process.
Christine Perrin:Well, thank you. But I want to know where the discipline came for you to, like, take those eight hour drives to get that desk or look for it or walk around with the mortar and then just all the small parts and the hole. Were there things in your life that helped her prepare you for that? Or was there an eros, a chaste eros that drove you towards it?
Brian Williams:That's a good that's a good question. And I'll I'll revert back to, again, probably some of the sensibilities I inherited from fam from mom and dad, and then some of the patterns of of living that I saw in in mom and dad that if I if I think I haven't really thought like, why am I the way I am? That's why you're asking me.
Christine Perrin:Patterns. I love the patterns.
Brian Williams:I think that one of the things I inherited certainly from my dad and my my my family in general, there are a lot of pretty ambitious people. My dad was an identical twin, and my dad and his identical twin brother, as well as their siblings and my grandmother, all have deep seated ambition in them and drive. And so my grandmother, as a single woman, went to seminary by herself back in the 1930s to get a degree in education and theology. Well, not most single women were doing that back in the 1930s or whenever, right? And so my my dad, significantly creative person, so just just excurs us on Meredith Williams, he was a music professor, like I said, for decades at a at a little Christian college, and in the nineteen seventies, he started or 1969, 1970, dad started a little brass choir.
Brian Williams:And then 1970, '71, he added singers to this. '72, he added a rhythm and whole backup section. Then bought five big screens and then slide projectors and then started writing programs. And so then he he and a couple friends and he was directing all of this every year. They would write three ninety minute programs integrating music and drama and slides.
Brian Williams:College students would come to the school to be in this band to be in this group called Impact Brass and Singers. They would try out. My dad's standards were very, very high and it would be the most, you know, the most excellent musicians and singers on campus, and then they would rehearse every weekend, and then in the spring they would start going out to churches to perform, and then every year we'd go to Nashville, Tennessee. They'd record an album, and then every summer ended up buying a tour bus, and they'd go on summer tour for ten weeks every summer crisscrossing the country, Canada, Mexico, Jamaica, Hawaii, these kind of things. And I would go on summer tour with them and my family would for probably five or six of those weeks, and my dad's standards were exacting.
Brian Williams:They were very high, and this is doing theology through the arts in the early to mid 70s before it became a trendy kind of thing, or before, you know, friends like, you know, my good friend David Taylor and others started doing this, you know, in the most recent decades. And so with my dad, I saw this, like, huge ambition and, you know, so, you know, he would organize ten weeks of summer tour without the Internet, without GPS. It would be dad with a, you know, contact. And then you've got like 30 college students plus, you know, my dad, his assistant director, our family, working, you know, we'd be in a different church every night. The churches would put us up.
Brian Williams:We'd be in different people's homes every night, three day weekends. And so my dad was doing this back in the 70s and 80s, for me, that's just what I grew up with, right? This attention to detail, this attention to beauty, this kind of grand ambition, and this is replicated in my, especially my cousins who are the the the children of my dad's identical twin and my own brothers. And so to have kind of an ambitious vision, I I think probably I inherited that. But, hey, that's no different from anybody who's starting a school.
Brian Williams:I mean, I'm always amazed by founders of schools, like just the energy and the vision and the drive and the patience that takes, or anybody that does a, you know, a graduate degree or like you writes a book of poetry. I mean, it's having that that end vision in mind, right? And it's keeping really in your imagination, what could this be? What could this look like? And then working your way back and thinking what needs to happen today to get to that vision, you know, in ten years or twenty years.
Brian Williams:Mean, I mean, this is really this is no different than Aristotle just thinking the final cause of a thing. The final cause of a thing is that end ambition, that end vision of whatever it is you want to create and then working your way back. So I think for me with this building, I knew what I wanted for our community of Templeton Honors College, and we we care about community. We try to foster community, but we never had a space within which our community couldn't could could really dwell. And so I had an imagination for what this could look like, and I started floating ideas about this back in 2019, and we're in 2026 right now, and at that point in time it was just starting to kind of dream a little bit and have some initial conversations with the people that needed to have that conversation, so a couple benefactors, know, the heads of my university, and to say, what do you think about?
Brian Williams:You know, could it could we do this? Could it look like this? And then really just not letting it go. And then, but you know, you have to hold it all loosely too, because there are all kinds of I have all kinds of projects and dreams that never happen. So you have to also let go of things easily.
Brian Williams:And there were a couple moments during COVID where I thought, oh, this isn't gonna happen. And that's okay. Maybe it'll happen with the next person. Right? And maybe it'll happen
Christine Perrin:ten That's years from a hard thing.
Brian Williams:And that's a hard thing when you put a lot of time and love and energy into something, but I think it's just like what I tell my students too. Hey, you have to have dreams and visions, but hold them loosely because you can't just fiddle with all the knobs and dials on the life machine and make it go the way you want it to go, as you know, as we both know. And so I had to take that same approach to this space and think this would be a great gift to my community, but it might not happen. And I might not be the one to pull it off and that I had to be okay with that.
Christine Perrin:I am so glad you brought that up. I didn't really think to ask that question, but I love that tension that you're describing. It's not just discipline. It's not just imagination. It's also the grip that you hold on the thing.
Christine Perrin:And something else that you said that I want to follow-up on, you said that you wanted to do it for the community, and you wanted a certain kind of community that you've already been cultivating. But there are so many people that feel that the material world or the built world ought to be an afterthought. I mean, it's a kind of moral imperative to them that the stuff of this world shouldn't matter to us. And I'm wondering how you see the harmony between the material built world, similar to Christopher Alexander, actually being integrally involved in the moral relational world? How do we put those things together?
Brian Williams:Yeah, think for me, it's a robust doctrine of creation that underlies most of what I do in life. A robust doctrine of creation allied with a robust doctrine of the incarnation, allied with a robust eschatological vision of the new heavens and the new earth. All three of those moments that I just mentioned, the original creation, the incarnation, and the eschatological recreation of heaven and earth, it's all material. It's all physical. It's not a disembodied existence.
Brian Williams:For whatever reason, God seems to like matter and be fascinated with matter and to make material things. And so I think there's a heart of our Christian faith is kind of an unconditional affirmation of the goodness of materiality. And then God makes people in His image in a way, but not in a way, because He doesn't make us like angels who are disembodied. He he makes us in his image but gives us bodies and then says, oh, look what else I gave you. I made you a starter garden.
Brian Williams:Right? Here's a starter garden for you. And so, like, you I started it. You go do something with it. You wanna move the rose bushes over there.
Brian Williams:You wanna divert that river over there. You want you want apple trees, not pear trees. Okay. Go for it. But you carry on the work in your own way that I started and then hand it over to you.
Brian Williams:So it seems to me that anything we're doing with the material world, the creation of culture, the creation of matter, the creation of art, the creation of poetry through through material words, right, the creation of a built environment, that's just carrying on the work that really God gave Adam and Eve to do in the beginning with their starter garden and said, now go develop it. And that development throughout history and time is what we now call culture. But it seems to be me that that's what we're kind of supposed to do with this stuff. Like, you know, affirming the goodness of what God gave us, and in a way making more of it than it would have been if we had left it to itself. Right?
Brian Williams:Like I'm sitting at a table, beautifully planed, beautifully carved, that's not only beautiful but also useful. This was a tree. Okay, we could have left this as a tree in in the forest and it would have fallen and it would have, you know, rotted and it would have nurtured maybe some flowers. Fine, but somebody said, Oh, think about what we can make with that tree. We can make a a beautiful table that Christine and Brian can sit around in twenty twenty six, one hundred and fifty years from now, making more of creation than it would have been if we'd left it to itself.
Brian Williams:So it just seems to me that this is part of what God, you know, gave us to do as creatures and then affirmed through the incarnation. And then the great hope is that the eschatological new creation of heaven and earth will still be material. I mean, that seems that's Paul's vision in Corinthians, that's Paul's vision in Romans, and so for me we are embodied souls, we are in souled bodies, and those bodies matter, and the built space within which we put those bodies matter, and the desire to live harmoniously or with integrity, a kind of integritas of the parts, means that our built environment, I don't know, it ought to be humane in a way, and that we ought to lead with that, I think. And, you know, to your question about community, we don't live outdoors. I love the outdoors.
Brian Williams:I'm an outdoorsman. Love I love hiking, camping, swimming. You you name it. Put me outdoors, and I'm I'm as happy outdoors as I am in a classroom. But the buildings within which we live, the spaces we create for ourselves, they ought to attend to what it means to be human, and part of what it means to be human is that we are naturally inclined to respond to beauty in positive ways and naturally inclined to be in community with other people.
Brian Williams:And so to create spaces that are beautiful, that are hospitable, that are restful within which community can happen, and not only just can happen, because community can happen in a cinder block prison house. Right? Mean, it does, yes. And it does, but that's not ideal by any stretch of the imagination, and you foster community in those spaces despite the physical surroundings, right? I mean, is the idea behind the the Gothic cathedral that you walk into the cathedral and your your eyes look up, and I've seen this so many times, I'm sure you have too, you feel there's a wonder that you feel and those emotions of wonder and delight and awe, those naturally transfer to your feelings of wonder, delight and God.
Brian Williams:It reinforces the emotions you ought to have in those kinds of spaces, right? And so I think why not help us nurture our communities? Why not help us nurture and become attentive to beauty in the spaces that we create? So for instance, in Templeton Hall, yes, like I said, we have designed spaces both inside and outside that intentionally foster spontaneous community. And so we have patios outdoors in the sun where where students can spill over after class and carry on the conversations and start in class into these spaces ready made for that.
Brian Williams:For instance, in the heart of the building, we put our our student common room, and I'll just say we called it the common room, not a lounge, because a lounge to me is again where you kick back in your sweats and slippers sitting on the couch eating Doritos playing video games, as I tell my kids. And then right next to the student common room is the faculty common room because we wanted to nurture this natural free flowing community between faculty and students. And then we put the faculty common room intentionally on the 2nd Floor and all the faculty offices on the 1st And 3rd Floor, so everybody had to leave their office or their space to go to the common space.
Christine Perrin:Oh, that's fantastic. Then
Brian Williams:we created an inner courtyard where you can be outside but feel like you're inside in a kind of protected space, but enjoy the sun, and then we have windows throughout the building because we have a beautiful campus, and light always signals to me holiness and beauty, but also huge windows that you can be inside and feel like you're outside, So there's not that kind of barrier between you and the natural world outside, but also so that you know you can be inside but be in community with other people. And so we really intentionally designed the space as much as we could, working with an already built home to create these kind of spaces to respond really to what it means to be human.
Christine Perrin:So much there. I mean, will just start working my way backward first, just you have spaces where many people can sit, you have spaces where just a few people can sit, you have benches everywhere where people can
Brian Williams:We public sit spaces and I would say secret spaces. Yes. And this is one of the really interesting things, because it's on my mind because I was just talking to students in this space. On our 2nd Floor, right outside our elevator, which is right next to our storage space, I had not designed that space to be anything but just like an open space that you would go through to get on the elevator. Well, it's tucked away on the 2nd Floor.
Brian Williams:It's out of that common area of like footpath traffic and almost and there's a ledge there almost immediately the first weekend. Where did students? Where did they? Where did they gravitate? Oh, this little tucked away corner of the building where they could sit on a ledge and read a book in quiet.
Brian Williams:And so there I thought, Oh, I didn't design this, but attending to the kind of natural human patterns that I was observing, I was like, let's let's reinforce that. So I got an old desk, I put a couple bookshelves there, I bought cushions for the ledge, put some chairs there, and now it's one of the favorite spots in the building because students can kind of get get away, right? And so that's a private space, and we have a library then next to our library, it used to be an old, I don't know, like outdoor patio, but it was walled in. It's a more quiet private study space, and so we tried to think, let's have public spaces, like you said, but then also private spaces, and obviously all of our faculty have kept private offices, but just try to create a space within which kind of depending on the size of your group and your mood, you could find a place to nestle in and rest. One of my favorite moments in the whole experience here was the weekend before the building actually opened.
Brian Williams:I had one of my students, as they did the whole time it was being built, sneak in And I happened to be there when this female student came in, when it was finally really essentially done, and I don't think she had been in yet. And she walked in and she saw me and she gasped and she said, Oh, doctor Williams, I wanna live here. Can I move in? And I just thought, Jeanie, that is exactly what I've been working towards for six years.
Christine Perrin:That's how I feel.
Brian Williams:To create the kind of space where you, Christine, or Jeanie, or my other students could feel like, oh, this is a space that I can call home for a few years and and settle into.
Christine Perrin:Yes. You know? Yes. And just like you were saying earlier, I feel it in my body. I just feel good.
Christine Perrin:I want to go back to something you said about creation because it has been the case that many people that are makers, whether they're sculptors or painters or poets, or even people making tables, as you referenced, and I'm thinking of Dorothy Sayers here writing about this, but have said that when we make, we are fellowshipping with God. In a sense, we're following after what He did in creation. We're using His materials, but we're also using even some of the gestures that he made. For instance, Lynette Hull, when she did her podcast with me, she's an iconographer, she talked about the fact that there's clay on the boards, and there's gold leaf on the boards, and the way that you begin to make them combine is to breathe on them, literally to breathe on them. So you're enacting the pattern of creation when you make these things in a very explicit way.
Christine Perrin:Now, obviously, and there's a whole theology connected to that. That's true when you make a table from a tree as well.
Brian Williams:I mean, think about it. If I interrupt, like when we read Genesis one, right, how does it start? In the beginning, you know, the world was tohu vabohu, with these Hebrew words that mean unformed and unfilled. And then on the first three days of creation, God forms spaces. Braiding the water in the earth Right, to forms spaces, and then on the following three days of creation, He fills the spaces He had formed.
Brian Williams:So when you think about forming and filling, like I would say the tree in the forest, you know, fallen on the ground is a little tohu a bohu. It's unformed and unfilled, and what the carpenter who made this table did was he formed that unformed matter, which seems to be what God did in creation, right? And when we think about like the art, we have art throughout building of course. Before the artists made the work of art, what they had was a palette of blobs of color. Unformed.
Brian Williams:Right? Then they then they bring order out of that unformed chaos, if you will, to create a beautiful work of art. I mean, that what you have in mind? It seems to me like that is the work of the artist
Christine Perrin:and the maker. It's flang.
Brian Williams:With words, Right? When you think
Christine Perrin:Shape it.
Brian Williams:You're taking, like you know, just think of I I think of poets, you know, like a scattered bunch of words on the table. And you're looking at them going, I can do something with this. Then you start forming them. You put a few of them together. You're making them a shape.
Brian Williams:If you're George Herbert, you're giving them, like, actual shapes. Oh my. But, know, you're giving them you're you're taking from the unformed and unfilled chaos of a bunch of words, and you're creating something formed and filled that is a a beautiful work of art to pass on to somebody else. And isn't that what God did for us in creation?
Christine Perrin:Yeah. One of the things about poetry is that you get to put the poet's words in your mouth and your ears. You get to fill them up. You get to enact them or reify them in your own body.
Brian Williams:Like when you when you when you recite them, you speak them?
Christine Perrin:Yeah. So we'll go to that later because we both share a love of so many of the same poems. And, oh, there's so many things I wanna talk to you about, Brian. But let me go be disciplined here and say, on the other end, there are the people that say, Why does matter matter? And then on the other end, there are people that say, they quote Dostoevsky saying, Beauty will save the world.
Christine Perrin:And I'll say that again, Beauty will save the world. And there's a sense I would love to talk about that with you because that's said in a certain context in one of Dostoyevsky's novels. And fellow writer that we love, Rowan Williams, has talked about that. And we hear a lot of people throwing that around in our circles. We all know that beauty matters.
Christine Perrin:And we all know that it's worth considering as a transcendental. I mean, I think that people are beginning to see, you know, we have our friend Timothy Petitsas, who also has been on our podcast, has talked about a beauty first approach to the transcendentals where you beauty because it has these talents that sink themselves into your senses and pull you in, it leads us to goodness and truth. And that might be one of the things that people are saying when they quote Dostoevsky. But I'd like to examine it a little bit because it seems like it could also be a very facile way of stating something that we're trying to piece together here.
Brian Williams:Yeah, think that's right. I'm always a little nervous when people use it. My friend Gregory Wolfe has a book called Beauty Will Save the World, and you should go read Gregory's book. He teaches for us sometimes in the Honors College here in our master's program. I mean, that quote, we shouldn't probably attribute it to Dostoevsky.
Brian Williams:It it comes in his novel, The Idiot, which was the most important Dostoevsky novel for me. It was the first one I read.
Christine Perrin:I've read it four times, and I cannot read it again. I it pains me so much, but I'd love to hear why it was the most important to you.
Brian Williams:Well, it's Prince Michikin, the kind of Christ figure there who airs on the side of generosity and love and allows himself to be taken advantage of over and over and over again in a way modeling the kind of self sacrifice of Christ, I think. And for someone like me who typically tends to assert himself in any moment and situation and conversation, Mishkin Mishkin is a really important model
Christine Perrin:for He
Brian Williams:chastises
Christine Perrin:you.
Brian Williams:For me. He does chastise He does. I
Christine Perrin:love that.
Brian Williams:I I sometimes think I need to channel Michigan, and so I have to remind myself to do that. And and this is, you know, Dostoevsky said he was trying to create a vision of a beautiful man. Yes. But that line, beauty will save the world, not Myshkin never actually Dostoevsky never says it, and Myshkin himself doesn't ever say it. There is a I think there's an atheist character named Ippolit in in the novel who's dying of consumption.
Christine Perrin:And is tempted to kill himself.
Brian Williams:Tempted to kill himself, he and he, on a couple of occasions, says, the prince said, I think, beauty will save the world. Right. And so it's a I think Dostoevsky introduces it almost with a giant question mark. Like, will beauty save the world? I mean, he puts it in the mouth of a secondary atheist, consumptive character thinking about ending his life.
Christine Perrin:Well, who actually tries to, and it's
Brian Williams:Oh, that's right.
Christine Perrin:Not loaded. The the or, like, the catchment.
Brian Williams:And so I almost think Dostoevsky is is sliding sliding that statement across the table to us and saying, will it? Do you think it? How so? In what way? Yes.
Brian Williams:And so to make so I'm hesitant to make that bold claim, but to say other than to say, God is beautiful, part of the defining property of beauty is the harmony of the parts. When God made the world, he harmonized the parts, making them formed and filled. God himself draws us to Himself through, I think, beauty, and that we see, as I said before, that beauty refracted and reflected in all the various shards of the world. And so if we mean by that God bringing the world back into a beautiful harmony, God as beauty redeeming the world, God as beauty working through beauty to draw us to God's self, then I can get on board with it. Mean, I I think here of it doesn't all come back to Dante and the comedy, but it does.
Brian Williams:And here, Dante's love of Beatrice is the means through which God draws Dante to God's self. Dante was drawn to Beatrice, and in the story of the comedy, God doesn't ignore that, doesn't reject that, but he uses that that his affection and attraction to Beatrice to draw Dante to Beatrice and then beyond Beatrice to God. And so there's this beautiful moment. We have a great painting here in the Honors College from eighteenth century Italian of Dante looking at Beatrice who's looking at God. Because Dante can't look directly at God until his eyes are strengthened and he and he's ready to.
Brian Williams:But then there's a beautiful moment where he turns away from Beatrice to see God himself. When C. S. Lewis reflected on this, and he was more influenced by Dante, I think, than any other author, he identifies all these moments in his own life where he was drawn to beauty.
Christine Perrin:And Surprised by Joy. And, yes.
Brian Williams:And through that beauty, drawn to God, and he calls them explicitly, Beatrizan experiences. And so there's this moment where as a kid, he's reading Beatrix Potter's Squirrel Nutkin, which is a favorite in my own family. And there's a description of the fall leaves at the beginning of that. And he said that created an ache, a longing. Zane Zugt.
Brian Williams:Yeah, exact that sweet aching. And then he says that can only be satisfied ideally by God, but it's it's a desire. It's an experience of beauty that draws me through beauty. One time he's looking at a painting of the Wye River Valley on the border of England and Wales, and I've been to the Wye River Valley and it's even more spectacular than any painting, but he experienced this in that kind of painting. Yes.
Brian Williams:And so
Christine Perrin:And two other moments. One is the little tin garden
Brian Williams:that
Christine Perrin:his brother brought. That's right. And the other is the words bald or the beautiful is dead. That's right. I mean,
Brian Williams:I love this. These these
Christine Perrin:moments changed my life too, just reading about them.
Brian Williams:And this is, you know, his his best friend Charles Williams, wrote one of the most well, most of what Williams wrote was bizarre, but I absolutely love it. But he was a Dante scholar as well. Yes. And in his fantastic book on the history of the church called Descent of the Dove, he identifies two ways, if you will, of doing the Christian faith the history of the church. One is, he says, the Franciscan way of denying all things to the glory of God.
Brian Williams:And he says that is an appropriate way of doing the Christian faith in the history of the church. So the church has taken at times, the denial of all things to the glory of God. The other way is the via affirmativa, affirming all things to the glory of God. Oh. And for him, that's the way of Dante.
Brian Williams:If you read the comedy, there's there's nothing that doesn't make its way into the comedy. And that Dante thinks all of these can be drawn into the glory, of God and and through the way of affirmation. And so when I think of what I've tried to do in this building or what we try to do in the Honors College, really, I it's following that second way, the via affirmativa, the way of affirming all things to the glory of God, and the drawing of all of creation, and all the shards and slivers of beauty that we find in the world, allowing those to draw us to beauty, but through beauty to the beautiful and holy one of God. And so in that sense, will beauty save the world? Well, it makes a good start on it.
Christine Perrin:Look at you coming back to the originating question. I'm very tempted to get into this really specific conversation about Dostoevsky, but I won't do that.
Brian Williams:Happy to do it, but you you know answered answered I'm a Dostoevsky fan and always have been, so.
Christine Perrin:You answered it so well, and you took us on this journey. I love the via affirmativa.
Brian Williams:Via affirmativa versus the via negativa. And I love that William says both of these are valid ways of doing the Christian life. He traces these two ways out throughout church history, And it's really fascinating. Again, the book is Descent of the Dove, and he wants to say these are two ways. There's the there's the the ascetic tradition, right?
Brian Williams:The monastic tradition, if you will, you know, the way of simplicity and the way of plainness. And he's like, that's a valid way of pursuing God. But so is this other way.
Christine Perrin:It is so fascinating because even as you try to separate them, you know, you think about Benedict going and sitting in the cave, and then the whole monastic education developing from that in these beautiful monasteries on cliffs. Then you think about Francis taking off his clothes that his rich father gave him in the middle of the square, and then begging bread each day, and then rebuilding the church, and now you go and you see that church, which is inside a church, or you see the frescoes of his life painted on, you know, in Assisi, and you just think, I don't know, beauty begets beauty. Whether it's the beauty of simplicity or of negativa or affirmativa, it's, it just is teeming with gratuity. Just replicates and replicates.
Brian Williams:Well, I would say that neither one of these ways. So so the the one way, the via negativa, does not mean that you're then obtuse to beauty. I mean, we live in Amish country. Right? The the Amish are known for their their simplicity.
Brian Williams:But, man, they can make some beautiful furniture. Yes. And, man, they can make some beautiful barns. Right? So there's there's still craftsmanship and beauty in what they make and and certainly certainly community.
Brian Williams:And on the other side, the via affirmative, it doesn't mean you just get to indulge any desire that you want to pursue opulence. But it's it still means, no, you have to have temperance with respect to the pursuit of beauty, but you maybe lead with the beauty versus leading with the the the simplicity perhaps. May that's not that doesn't seem quite right, does it?
Christine Perrin:Well, I
Brian Williams:don't beauty versus simplicity. There is a there is a restraint, maybe on the one side of being negativa. Again, like he says, denying all things to the glory of God.
Christine Perrin:Or a shedding of things. I think of that phrase, the Euclidean beauty. There's something that's very simple and very natural and very built into the structure of our existence, you know, where you shed these things and then you find another beauty inside. And that makes me think of Hopkins, which
Brian Williams:If it doesn't come back to Dante, it comes
Christine Perrin:That's back to And Hopkins lived this very austere life, and kind of came from Oxford to he lost Oxford, he ended up in a sort of miserable industrial towns, burned his poems, and then started writing again. And his poems are so luxuriant. I mean, even the poems that are about his struggle with despair are so full of luxuriance.
Brian Williams:Yeah. Let alone the wreck of the Deutschland, right, or something like that, which is which is just luxury. Which got it going. You know? Yeah.
Brian Williams:That's right.
Christine Perrin:And and so I wonder I mean, I I do think that we could talk for the rest of the day. And I love what we've covered so far, but I wonder if we might just end with Hopkins.
Brian Williams:Yeah. Yeah.
Christine Perrin:Is there anything else that you would want to say about Templeton or about I'm not sure there are many things, but that that you feel are unfinished in our conversation?
Brian Williams:That just the one thing I would say that we tried to create here in Templeton Hall of a beautiful and humane space within which people would want to live and which would foster the kind of community that we care about, which is a deeply formative community attending to the true, good, beautiful, and holy, and giving our students practice in attending to the true, good, beautiful and holy. The only final thing I would say about that is just I wanted my students to have kind of poetic experience of or an experience of a beautiful space and a community that was oriented to the true, good, beautiful and holy. So that when they left this space and they went into those kind of, if you will, spaces that didn't attend to that, they would feel it in their bones and they would think, Oh, what can I do here to bring truth, goodness, beauty, and holiness into this material space, into this community, in order to bless others, in order to pursue the common good and the love of my neighbor? And so I I think sometimes I just tell them I'm giving them four years of practicing the way I hope they live the rest of their lives.
Brian Williams:Right? Pursuing beauty, worshiping God, serving their neighbor, asking big questions, reading good books, having good conversations. And that's what we're doing. That's what this space was designed to do.
Christine Perrin:I love that. I do think we talk too much about things rather than giving encounters. And I think that is a very good note for us to end on as we speak about this space, that you have to have a poetic encounter. For instance, you have to have a moment of attention to know you wanna go back and have more of them.
Brian Williams:Yeah. That's right. I mean, I my my example here is always, I love Kenneth Branagh. I got to see him play Hamlet back in '93 in in in Stratford, It was just dumb luck. But he said he hated Shakespeare in high school.
Brian Williams:And he said, I'm because what are we gonna use? We just read it, kind of wrote Lee in class. And he said, then the first time I went to a play and I experienced Shakespeare performed, then he had this this converting experience to to Shakespeare and its beauty be and it became Kenneth Branagh, if if you will. And so I I think about that and I think how do I not just tell my students this is good for you, being out in the woods is good for you. Now I come on a hike with
Christine Perrin:me.
Brian Williams:Let's go. Let's go camping, right? And then I don't have to tell you the goodness of being in the outdoor world. You you experienced it. I don't have to tell you you should have a conversation with your your friend.
Brian Williams:Let let me foster that kind of conversation for you. And so I think that's what we're trying to do here. But you know, I mean, this is not that much different, I think, probably than what Hopkins is reflecting on in something like God's grandeur. You know what that opens the world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out like shining from shook foil that gathers to a greatness like the ooze And of oil crushed, so he's looking at creation saying it is suffused with God's beauty, with God's goodness, with God's greatness.
Brian Williams:And he said it flashes out and like startles us, but then it also gathers like that ooze of that oil. But then he asks that question, why don't men pay attention to it? Why do men now not wreck his rod? Then he answers this question by saying, right, generations have trod, have trod, have trod, and all this bleared with trade, you know, smeared with toil and wears men's smudge and shares men's smell. And he kind of says, we have obscured our access to God's beauty and grandeur in creation.
Brian Williams:And I think also in the create the beautiful created works of God's creatures, right? Because we think of the industrial revolution that made it harder to encounter the natural beauty of creation. And then we I think of the way we've industrialized homes and furniture and our our schools that made it harder to encounter the goodness and beauty of the of the creations of God's creatures. And so Hopkins, there's almost this moment of despair that, oh, it's harder for us to see God's grandeur and beauty in in in the built in the created world and the and the sub created world. And then he answers it, right?
Brian Williams:Yeah, for all this, nature is never spent. There still lives the dearest freshness deep down things because the Holy Ghost over the bent world brews with warm breasts and with awe, bright wings.
Christine Perrin:And he's experiencing it as
Brian Williams:he says it. Yes. I, and I experienced it every time I quote that poem, right? Because, but I think what he's saying there at the end is this is this experience of beauty that leads us to God is still accessible to our students, is still accessible to people, but we might have to work for it. And I think we might have to be attentive to it, and we might have to lead with beauty once again to give our students and our families and our communities the experience of beauty through which God can draw them to the beautiful one who is Himself.
Christine Perrin:And Hopkins was attentive to it. I mean, when you read his journals, you see that those poems, they didn't come from nowhere. They came from this magnetic gravitational, just remarkable attention and description of the world that he inhabited. And so I love what you're saying that we have a role to play, and that this is not You know, I have a friend at Messiah who's a chemist who believes that these subcreations will exist in paradise. And, you know, so total is wrong.
Brian Williams:Poetry in the new heavens and the new earth. Because Hopkins won't be less than Hopkins. He'll still be Hopkins, and he has that,
Christine Perrin:you know, that Absolutely. Or we'll just be saying them back and forth to each other That's right. Yeah. Feeling the joy that we feel right now that
Brian Williams:we can And I think, you know, Christine, in in quoting Hopkins, I'm getting beautiful words in my mouth. And when I when I have my poem my students learn poetry, we never see the words. I just recite it to them, then we recite it together. And I just sometimes will ask them, what words do you enjoy having in your mouth? Or ears.
Brian Williams:Or ears. Right? That to me is not that different from asking what's kind of beautiful space do I want to put my my body into, right? I'm putting beautiful words in my mouth, beautiful words in my ears. What kind of beautiful space into which do I want to put my body?
Brian Williams:I think that's the same kind of thing.
Christine Perrin:And light. Just pure light. Let's start there. What kind of light would be a good place for your body to inhabit? So let's end with a not discursive conversation, but with Pied Beauty, you reading Pied Beauty.
Brian Williams:Okay. It's Pied Beauty by Hopkins. Glory be to God for dappled things, for skies of couple color as a branded cow, For rose moles all in stipple upon trout that swim, fresh fire cold chestnut falls, finches wings. Landscape plotted and pieced full, fallow and plow, and all trades their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, smears, strange, whatever is fickle, freckled, who knows how?
Brian Williams:With swift, slow, sweet, sour, a dazzle dim, he fathers forth whose beauty is past change. Praise him. Amen. And amen.
Christine Perrin:Thank you, Brian.
Brian Williams:Thank you, Christine.
Christine Perrin:You've been listening to Composed with Christine Perrin, a podcast of the Humanitas Institute about composing well lived lives of virtue, craft, community, and delight.