On Beauty, Goodness & Truth

‘To them you are like a singer of love songs, one who has a beautiful voice and plays well on an instrument; they hear what you say, but they will not do it. When this comes—and come it will!—then they shall know that a prophet has been among them.’ (Ezekiel 33.32,33)

 

What Ezekiel is clearly saying is that you can sing a beautiful song that pleases the ears but doesn’t touch the heart; but a day is coming when they will hear.

 

‘Beauty’, Dostoevsky says, ‘will save the world’.

 

That sounds naïve, but actually is rooted in a deep philosophical conviction, indeed when beauty, goodness and truth when served together they are attractive and compelling.

 

The beauty of which Dostoevsky speaks is beauty that transcends aesthetics, that is to say it’s not just a matter of taste.

 

This is beauty that is integrated complex and intricate.

 

It is beauty that is not dismembered. A labelled diagram of a rose may be accurate but it is not beautiful as beholding a rose is.

 

This is beauty that inspires the best in us, that touches our deep aspirations.

 

Beauty, goodness and truth are known in philosophy and theology as the Transcendentals, along with unity, which, as it were, binds them together.

 

These are a great value and are baptised in the Christian tradition, in other words given a new perspective and freshness.

 

As an illustration of this, on my recent visit to Romania I saw churches that were painted with frescoes both inside and outside.

 

A favourite scheme was one that looks very typical in Christian art: on the top row Christ and his Blessed Mother, on the row below, the apostles, below them other saints, below them the prophets of the Old Testament and below them, as a philosophical bedrock the pre-Christian philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras and such like.

 

They spoke of beauty, truth, goodness and unity, and these transcendentals are fulfilled in Christ.

 

This is what St Paul recognised when his life was flooded with the radiant light of the beauty, goodness, truth and unity of Christ on the road to Damascus (cf Acts 26.12-18).

 

That literally dazzled and blinded him; his eyes opened to a new appreciation of the realities of the world as seen through the lens of Christ and his Body the Church.

 

Ezekiel said, ‘To them you are like a singer of love songs, one who has a beautiful voice and plays well on an instrument; they hear what you say, but they will not do it. When this comes—and come it will!—then they shall know that a prophet has been among them.’

 

The moment Paul, soaked in the philosophical tradition as a Greek and the prophetic tradition as a Jew, now heard beauty, goodness and truth and Christ the one who binds all together and completes the whole.

 

May we all continue to hear that ‘new song’ that attracts, converts, renews and saves.