Mathematics Is the Language in Which God Has Written the Universe and the Indispensable Basis for All Intellectual and Spiritual Progress

For most of history, the deepest form of education wasn't vocational at all. The liberal arts (artes liberales) were explicitly the curriculum of a free person—someone who didn't have to labor for a living—as distinct from the artes serviles, the trade skills of people who did. Grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy: none of it was meant to get you hired. It was meant to form a mind capable of self-governance, contemplation, and judgment. If all labor were obsoleted tomorrow, that wouldn't be a break from that tradition so much as a return to the leisure (scholē—the root of "school") it always assumed as its starting condition.

[The universe] is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth (Galilei, 1623, p. 3).

God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe (Dirac, 1963, p. 53).

The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics (Kepler, as cited in Kline, 1990, p. 231)

The study of mathematics is the indispensable basis for all intellectual and spiritual progress (Cornford, 1993, p. 8).

---

References

• Cornford, F. M. (1993). Mysticism and science in the Pythagorean tradition. In A. P. D. Mourelatos (Ed.), The Pre-Socratics: A collection of critical essays. Princeton University Press. https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781400863204_A23705297/preview-9781400863204_A23705297.pdf
• Dirac, P. A. M. (1963). The evolution of the physicist’s picture of nature. Scientific American, 208(5), 45–53. https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/guest-blog/the-evolution-of-the-physicists-picture-of-nature/
• Galilei, G. (1623). The assayer (S. Drake, Trans.). Stanford University. https://web.stanford.edu/~jsabol/certainty/readings/Galileo-Assayer.pdf
• Kline, M. (1990). Mathematical thought from ancient to modern times (Vol. 1). Oxford University Press.

---

Ordo Luminis Fraternitatis Aeternae