Truth, Goodness and Beauty

The Christian defence of transcendence:

If you find yourself crawling through a cave and come upon some old drawings on the wall, you can be sure of one thing: humans may have drawn pictures of animals, but no animals drew pictures of humans. That is just one major way in which human beings differ from animals.

Indeed, there are at least three markers of transcendence that separate us from animals: truth, goodness, and beauty. As such, Christians should be greatly interested in all three. However, we tend to champion the first two, but not so much the last one.

Given that I have been writing about art in some recent articles, let me take this a bit further. I do so by appealing to four different authors. In Russ Ramsey’s, Rembrandt Is In the Wind (Zondervan, 2022) he speaks to this early on:

From Socrates and Plato on down through Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, and Immanuel Kant, philosophers and theologians have long wrestled with the question, What makes humanity so distinct from all other forms of life? Three properties of being that transcend the capacities of all other creatures, known as transcendentals, have risen to the surface: the human desire for goodness, for truth, and for beauty.

 

Scripture regards these three transcendentals as basic human desires that are essential for knowing God. Why? Because these are three properties that define God’s nature. Good and evil point to the reality of undefiled holiness. Honesty and falsehood point to the existence of absolute truth. Beauty and the grotesque whisper to our souls that there is such a thing as glory. Goodness, truth, and beauty were established for us by the God who is defined by all three. (pp. 5-6)

He goes on to quote the Catholic philosopher and apologist Peter Kreeft. Since I have the volume where that quote comes from, let me offer more of it here. He has a chapter titled “Lewis’ Philosophy of Truth, Goodness and Beauty” in a book edited by David Baggett, Gary R. Habermas and Jerry L. Walls: C. S. Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty (IVP, 2008). He starts it this way:

There are three things that will never die: truth, goodness, and beauty. These are the three things we all need, and need absolutely, and know we need, and know we need absolutely. Our minds want not only some truth and some falsehood, but all truth, without limit. Our wills want not only some good and some evil, but all good, without limit. Our desires, imaginations, feelings or hearts want not just some beauty and some ugliness, but all beauty, without limit.

 

For these are the only three things that we never got bored with, and never will, for all eternity, because they are three attributes of God, and therefore all God’s creation: three transcendental or absolutely universal properties of all reality. All that exists is true, the proper object of the mind. All that exists is good, the proper object of the will. All that exists is beautiful, the proper object of the heart, or feelings, or desires, or sensibilities, or imagination. (This third area is more difficult to define than the first two.) …

 

Every culture seeks these three things too, for man makes culture before culture makes man. Some cultures, however, like some individuals, specialize in one of the three transcendentals… (p. 23)

He goes on to explain how Lewis excels in dealing with these concepts, and then he finishes his chapter with these words:

Truth, goodness and beauty are “patches of Godlight” here in “Shadowlands.” Their home is Yonder. The form they will take there will dazzle us forever, for they are what God is made of. Far from being “escapism,” this gives each of us the ultimate meaning of our individual existence in this world, for (as Lewis says in that little mystical masterpiece called the “Heaven” chapter in The Problem of Pain)

 

“each of the redeemed shall forever know and praise some one aspect of the divine beauty better than any other creature can. Why else were individuals created, but that God, loving all infinitely, should love each differently? . . . For doubtless the continually successful, yet never completed, attempt by each soul to communicate its unique vision of God to all others (and that by means whereof earthly art and philosophy are but clumsy imitations) is also among the ends for which the individual was created.” (p. 36)

My third witness is Kenneth Samples who wrote on these three transcendentals in an article published in 2021. Here is just a short portion of it:

For the famous Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, the world had genuine meaning and purpose. The cosmic values of truth (that which defines reality), goodness (that which fulfills its purpose), and beauty (that which is lovely) were objective in nature and knowable by the noble seeker. Since human beings had the internal capacities of logos (reason), ethos (morality), and pathos (emotion), these internal capacities corresponded to the cosmic values and brought forth human fulfillment:

-Logos corresponds to truth

-Ethos corresponds to goodness

-Pathos corresponds to beauty

https://reasons.org/explore/blogs/reflections/the-3-transcendentals-truth-goodness-beauty

Finally, I appeal to Brian Zahnd and his book Beauty Will Save the World: Rediscovering the Allure and Mystery of Christianity (Charisma House, 2012). He also speaks to the triad of truth, goodness, and beauty:

As radical as it may sound to those who have grown up in the sterile world of late modernity, asking the question Is it beautiful? is a valid and viable way to evaluate what we believe and do. We should ask ourselves: “Is this a beautiful doctrine?” “Is this a beautiful witness?” “Is this a beautiful practice?” Along with asking if it is true and if it is good, we should also ask if is it beautiful. Truth and goodness need beauty. Truth claims divorced from beauty can become condescending. Goodness minus beauty can become moralistic. To embrace truth and goodness in the Christian sense, we must also embrace beauty.

 

At least as far back as the Greek philosopher Plato, beauty was understood not merely as an adornment, but as a value as important as truth and goodness. It was only in the twentieth century that beauty began to be diminished as a value. Now we live in a day when pragmatism and utilitarian “values” have largely displaced beauty as a value. But the loss of beauty as a principal value has been disastrous for Western culture….

 

As our world turns its back on beauty, the result is that we are increasingly surrounded by ugliness and images of alienation. Think of government housing projects and the soulless strip malls of suburbia. Art itself is under assault. Art is now largely driven, not by time-tested standards of beauty, but by the marketplace. So the question is no longer, “Is it beautiful?,” but “Will it sell?” (Is this too reflected in the church?) In a world where kitsch, profit, and vulgarity are vandalizing art, philosopher Roger Scruton worries that we are in danger of losing beauty, and with it the meaning of life. Yes, the loss of beauty is related to the loss of meaning. Attaining to the beautiful is a valid way of understanding the meaning of life—especially when we recognize a link between the sacred and the beautiful. For thousands of years, artists, sages, philosophers, and theologians have connected the beautiful and the sacred and identified art with our longing for God. It has only been during the modern phenomenon of secularism—what Nietzsche described as the “death of God”—that we have severed the beautiful from the divine. But when the beautiful is severed from the absolute (God), what passes for beautiful can be anything and everything—which is to say nothing. There really is a profound connection between the loss of beauty and the loss of meaning.

 

Yet despite the modern assault upon art and beauty, the hunger for beauty abides deep in the human heart…. (pp. 28-30)

While Christians may have a need to emphasise beauty as much as they do truth and goodness, we must be aware that modern culture has actually declared war on all three. So the Christ follower must seek to champion them all. We each must seek God as to how we might engage in this vital task.

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