The Truth of Beauty: Educating the Moral Imagination

by Benjamin G. Lockerd, Jr.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

(Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”)

These famous lines of Keats have charmed and delighted readers for nearly two centuries, but skeptics have scoffed at his claim, especially as beauty is well known to be wholly subjective, a value found only “in the eye of the beholder.” Even those of us who are inclined to agree with the poet’s bold statement have been known to wonder whether this is really all we need to know. Surely we must add at least two other categories to the formula, for philosophers have long considered three subjects of contemplation to be paramount: the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. These topics give rise to the three prime branches of philosophy: metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. All three of these are considered by many people today purely relativistic concepts, and one of the goals of the Catholic educator must be to contradict the prevailing relativism, which is practically taken for granted even by many Catholic students, since, as T. S. Eliot says, secularism today “holds all the most valuable advertising space.”

In my experience, these students are more likely to grant me metaphysical claims than claims about morality and beauty. If I say that the universe is not merely atoms and void, not merely matter, they tend to agree. It becomes more contentious if I say that there are universal moral truths. If I give as an example the claim that it is always wrong to enslave another person, they will readily agree, but if I say it is wrong (on essentially the same principle) to use human embryos for scientific research, I will have an argument with some. If I say that it is also wrong (still largely for the same reason) to bring about the conception of a human being in a laboratory in order to help an infertile couple have a child, I may meet with incredulity or even be denounced as a heartless disbeliever in the sanctity of motherhood.

Roger Scruton - Why Beauty Matters (video)

"The sacred and the beautiful stand side by side. Two doors that open onto a single space, in that space we find our home." Please watch this brilliant documentary on "Why Beauty Matters."

Presenting What is Beautiful: The Joyful Duty of Catholic Education

by Andrew Seeley

“Too late have I loved Thee, O Beauty, ever ancient, ever new!” St. Augustine was in his forties by the time he penned this personal lament. As readers of the Confessions know (and the Confessions has been a universal must-read for 1600 years), Augustine wasted himself for 30 years before he finally embraced the Lord in the greatest conversion story ever told. Throughout his retrospective, he refers to beauty, the need for beauty, the search for beauty. His wanderings away from the faith of his mother were intimately bound up with a search for beauty. He did not find beauty in his catechesis, nor in his early education, so he sought it in the wild passions of love and friendship. Eventually, Augustine found the Lord by realizing in very painful ways that other beauties disappointed when they were mistaken for real Beauty.

In his praise of the Lord, St. Augustine connects love and Beauty, for they are correlatives. Love is aroused by what is beautiful, beauty inspires love. We need to be inspired by what is truly beautiful, to be passionate about what is lovely. And to enjoy in the objects of natural affection a suggestion, a reflection of the Beauty that never passes.

Our nation’s Puritanical past might lead us to think that to be religious is to deny ourselves what is beautiful, but the opposite is true. The Danish movie, Babette’s Feast, provides a parable about a small fishing village that has driven out all that is beautiful in life in its misguided following of Christianity. The loss of beauty leads to a loss of joy and friendship. The humble cook, who is really a refugee French chef, wins a lottery fortune and uses it to prepare a sumptuous feast to celebrate the founder of the community. In the course of the feast, the village is re-awakened, re-evangelized and re-united.

Catholic schools have a joyful duty to present what is beautiful to their students. At the center of the school, the chapel and all religious services should present a feast for the eyes, the ears, the mind and the heart. Classrooms and hallways should be tastefully decorated; students will imbibe fine works of art over the course of their years at a school. Tasteful, rich, clever visual presentations should be an important factor when considering textbook series.

Beauty has an important place in the central activity of teaching and learning. Learning certainly requires discipline, but deep down it is a feast for the mind and heart. An ancient expression describing what it means to be beautiful is, “What pleases merely by being seen.” What is beautiful does not have to be possessed, consumed to please us; merely a look is sufficient to delight us. When we hear this, we immediately think of paintings, faces, the visible things seen by the eyes. But in a more profound sense, what pleases the mind by itself, without reference to possessing something, is truly beautiful.

Quote of the Day: Hans Urs von Balthasar

No longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man. We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it... 

Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past--whether he admits it or not--can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love. (The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 1)

The Power of Beauty

By Barbara J. Elliott

T.S. Eliot’s quote on beauty gladdened my soul.

The past several days I have had the opportunity to pull back from my otherwise consuming activities serving at-risk inner city teenagers, recovering drug addicts, prisoners transitioning into employment, nonprofit management and the inexorable necessities of fund raising, to focus on something altogether different: Beauty. In particular, the intersection of faith, art, and culture where the True, the Good and the Beautiful take form. The Glen Workshop, sponsored by Image, attracts poets, painters, and playwrights, writers of fiction and filmmakers, illustrators, collage-makers and musicians from across the continent for a week in Santa Fe to deepen their craft or learn a new one. Many – but not all – are people of faith, wrestling with the calling that accompanies their gifts, struggling to give shape to the collision of the immanent and the transcendent, the irruption of spirit into the material realm, and the journey of the human soul from doubt to belief.

What value can art have in a world so distressed by war, ideological clashes, poverty, economic implosion, moral disintegration, unemployment, and all the other ills that afflict us? John Paul II addressed the value of work – all work – in his encyclical Laborem Exercens:

“When a man works he not only alters things and society, he develops himself as well. He learns much, he cultivates his resources, he goes outside himself and beyond himself. Rightly understood, this kind of growth is of greater than any external riches which can be garnered…. Hence the norm of human activity is this: that in accord with the divine plan and will, it should harmonize with the genuine good of the human race, and allow people as individuals and as members of a society to pursue their total vocation and fulfill it.” (Laborem Exercens, 23)

It is refreshing, and a little surprising for someone who has been so long entrenched in the dissolute realm of poverty and broken down neighborhoods and systems, to discover a gathering of serious souls involved in the hard work of creating beauty. By that I don’t mean the saccharine realm of prettiness, but the difficult kind of beauty incarnate in the suffering Christ and the scandal of the cross.

Art has the twin functions of reflecting a culture and shaping it. The problem that contemporary artists face is a difficult one: how to express meaning to a world which has become culturally over-stimulated by the spectacular, hyper-sexualized, dumbed-down by inanity, and increasingly antagonistic to manifestations of Christianity. Some of the artists who are here this week struggle to believe that the vocation as an artist – especially a Christian artist – has any meaning or value at all. They are at the edge of redefining and creating anew with moral imagination a vision of the True, the Good and the Beautiful that has been all but exterminated in Western culture.

Quote of the Day--T.S. Eliot on Beauty

We mean all sort of things, I know, by Beauty. But the essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.--T.S. Eliot

Beauty for Truth's Sake

"Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past--whether he admits it or not--can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love." -Hans Urs von Balthasar

As von Balthasar makes clear, to deemphasize beauty in our pursuit of truth and goodness is to risk losing all three of the transcendentals. My hope is that The Imaginative Conservative community will give beauty her due in our online conversations.

A few suggested resources: the very fine journal Image, and its website, dedicated to faith and beauty found in literature, music, and art. The Beauty of Holiness and the Holiness of Beauty, by John Saward, is an excellent book which explores beauty as found in the lives of the saints and in the works of Christian art.  Finally I highly recommend the website Beauty for Truth's Sake, and the book by the same title, by Stratford Caldecott.