School of Sophia
Awaken the Love of Wisdom
Upcoming Season 2026-2027:
Beauty is Truth – Poets and Mystics
The novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky once wrote that ‘beauty would save the world’. The philosopher and mystic Simone Weil wrote that ‘the beautiful is the manifest presence of the real’. For the poet John Keats, all that we need to know is that ‘Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty’. This academic season, School of Sophia will explore the wisdom that arises out of the experience of beauty, drawing from great poets and mystics from the world’s great traditions.
Our everyday experience often suggests that the world is filled with ugliness. For some, ‘beauty’ may even be an uncomfortable notion. But is beauty just sensual pleasure, a matter of aesthetic taste, or even a dangerous delusion? Or is there a sense in which something unique about the depth and spirit of reality manifests itself in the experience of the beautiful? Is beauty ‘in the eye of the beholder’ as popular parlance says, or does it rather bring about a transformed vision, a radical change in our mode of seeing and witnessing reality? Is Dostoyevsky right – can beauty save the world?
We will explore the wisdom of beauty through a range of inspiring readings - from Plato and Plotinus to Sufi and Christian mystics and poets such as ‘Attar, Ibn ‘Arabi and Meister Eckhart. We will also draw on the visionary poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke and William Blake and listen to contemporary voices such as Iris Murdoch, Josef Pieper and Simone Weil.
Join us for what promises to be a beautiful season.
Our weekly seminars will start Tuesday 29 September, 6 30pm.
To find out more, please join our Live Q & A Chat, Thursday 27 August 4pm.
How the Seminars Work
To learn wisdom is to be a participant at a feast. Wisdom is the food of the whole of our being and the nourishment of the whole of our minds, a delicious kind of knowledge made not to be acquired but savoured and shared. Our seminars are grounded in the premise that wisdom is a real presence that underwrites and makes intelligible all human expression and relationships. It is not the ‘result’ of an act of study but becomes present in and through the act itself and is shared by the community which practices it. Wisdom is not the exclusive possession of the expert, the specialist or the ideologue: it is the common tongue, the common food and the common ground of all.
Weekly seminars, called Lectio Seminars, will take place both on-line and regularly in person. There will also be regular additional sessions, the Contemplatio Seminars, to which guest speakers will be invited, and which will develop particular aspects and themes of our reading.
Lectio Seminars
The Lectio Seminar begins with an introductory lecture and proceeds to a meditative deep reading and creative dialogue. This contemplative form of reading is respectfully inspired by the monastic practice of lectio divina. Since wisdom is ‘delicious’, our approach will be that of the lectio: that is, tasting, savouring and ‘digesting’ the sources in dialogical contemplation rather than reducing them to propositional material fit for a disinterested enquiry. Our approach will therefore be participatory, interpretive and convivial.
Contemplatio Seminars
These seminars will include special guests - thinkers, teachers and artists - and are an opportunity to discuss our weekly readings in the light of greater current issues, to approach our complementary text in various creative ways, and to engage in communal and convivial dialogue grounded in openness and friendship to wisdom.