From Beauty to Goodness to Truth to Goodness to Beauty (Part I: From Beauty to Goodness)

A Glimpse of Beauty

            Consider a popular phrase: “He (or she) really has his (or her) life together.” This is said in a spirit of admiration. Why? What is so admirable about a person having his or her life together? Further, what exactly does it mean to have one’s life together?

            Before analyzing that question, let us, first, consider the reason for our saying it so often. Perhaps here an intuition will be useful: we human beings seem to first be enraptured by the beauty of something, rather than its intrinsic truth or goodness. We seek to do the good, yes, and we also seek the truth, yes, but we, first, seek the beautiful.

            What does this mean in concrete human actions? It means that what first motivates us is the vision of something which possesses clarity, integrity, and proportionality – in other words, that which is beautiful. The following are examples of such visions:

            “I am standing on top of a mountain, after a grueling two-day climb, 20,000 feet, with clouds under my feet. I have achieved something.”

            “I am married to a woman who deeply loves me, who loves me uniquely in the special way of marital love. We have children for whom we work together to care for, to nourish, to cherish, and to teach how to live life in all of its reality.”

            “I wake up daily to go perform work which I am deeply passionate about. I lose myself in my work. It brings me great joy to complete my tasks, and it also brings positive change to society. God’s grace permeates my work: even in the most trying of circumstances, I can feel a palpable sense, sometimes so deeply integrated that it can be missed, of peace – a peace which brings forth, from the deepest depths of my being, a resolve to perform my work well.”

            Let me, here, be vulnerable: these are my own visions of beauty – and they are, most likely, the strongest visions I have ever had.

A Will to Do Good

            It is now after this glimpse of beauty – this glimpse of, in some apophatic sense, eternity – that our wills feel drawn to reforming our lives in order to pursue that vision.

            “I need to build a life of discipline and training so that I can successfully scale that mountain.”

            “I need to build, in myself, the virtues of chastity, purity, masculinity, strength, romance, spontaneity, discipline, self-sacrifice, and industriousness (that is, I must be a fully actualized man), in order that I find a woman worthy of my hand in marriage, and a woman who herself desires such a man as that who I wish to be. If I want a woman who herself seeks to build, in her character, chastity, purity, femininity, strength, romance, spontaneity, discipline, self-sacrifice, and industriousness (that is, a fully actualized woman), then I must myself seek to build those virtues. Therefore, I must improve. The stakes are too great if I fail to do so. The culture of complacency, of mediocrity, and, ultimately, of death, are too powerful and they will only be beaten back by authentic virtue.”

            “If I want to daily perform work through which I find deep, authentic meaning, then I have to build discipline and hold myself accountable to a high standard of excellence. This accountability must also be consistent, for excellence is not an act, but a habit.”

            The key is that the pursuit of the beautiful ultimately will, if we really have found the beautiful and if we really have surrendered ourselves to its calling and beckoning, reform us. Consider that word – “reform”. We shed our current form (our current dispositions, habits, likes, and dislikes) and, in its place, build a renewed form (with new dispositions, habits, likes, and dislikes). Now, for the hard truth – the truth we all know and despise, yet also the truth which ultimately gives us hope in making moral progress: this reformation is painful and difficult.

A Digression on Music, Beauty, and the Good

            Let me, for a second, focus on a rather bizarre cultural phenomenon of modern times: the rise of ugly, disgusting, boring, banal, and degrading-to-the-dignity-of-the-human-person music. One of the most ironic sights of modern times is seeing those who claim to be for the advancement of woman’s rights listen (with pleasure) to completely pointless music which explicitly degrades women. There is, of course, no better example than (most of) rap; but the likes of Katy Perry, Ariana Grande, and Nicki Minaj are no better.

            Now, let’s say that I’m a man, and I wish to find a woman of the virtues listed above (that is, a fully actual woman, or, perhaps more aptly put, a woman who is conscious of her potential and actively striving and struggling to fulfill it). It is rather obvious that listening to music which consistently degrades the dignity of men, women, and relationships between them – that is, by trivializing sex, by glorifying banal and boring binge drinking, and by turning each other into narcissists – well, it is rather obvious that listening to such music is not going to help build the virtue necessary to find a woman of that caliber. Now, the man here has a clear choice: either elevate one’s musical taste, to that of real excellence and beauty, to that which stirs the soul to climb great heights, or continue with the mediocrity of the moderns. He could become pusillanimous in making this decision, with various excuses, the most base of which is, “Does it really matter what music I listen to?”. To such a man, nothing can really be said: there is a reason Plato and Aristotle devoted significant majorities of their writings on education to the cultivation of good musical ability and taste in the young.

Music is a uniquely human activity – a gift from God to men, to express the inexpressible in song. Just as with sex, if we get music wrong, we get life wrong. What we feel uncomfortable speaking about in prose, we feel liberated to sing about in song. Thus, if we turn our (good and natural) desire for music into something which glorifies that which brings us away from the beautiful life, then we have become connoisseurs of ugliness – and, ultimately, our lives will reflect what we consume. Our lives will be ugly, but since we were made to live beautiful lives, we will be deeply dissatified with them. 

The Unborn: A Defense

"The unborn are not potential humans; they are humans with potential." 

This is the clearest expression of this simple, yet critical, truth. Whether or not someone is a person is dependent on only one attribute: whether or not they are a human. There has been much mischief wrought by people who, for various motives, have sought to dehumanize the unborn: one of the methods they have used is to argue that there is a moment in time when the biological unity which came into being at the moment of conception now becomes a "person". Certainly, an embryo does not yet have power of sentience; a baby does not yet have power of intellect; a toddler does not yet have power of will; a child does not yet have power of reproduction; an adolescent does not yet have power of emotional control; a college student does not yet have power of financial independence; and so on, and so forth. The adventure of life, in which various potencies are actualized – some by ourselves, others by other persons, all ultimately by Pure Actuality Himself – is precisely that: an adventure. But an adventure cannot happen without the adventurer. I, and every other human person in history, came from a specific biological unity: an embryo. A human person's moral worth does not derive from the subjective opinion of another human person, or a collective opinion of such human persons, but rather the objective fact of his or her *existence*. To argue that "moral worth is contingent on sentience" is to miss the very essence of moral thought, and perhaps the very essence of all rational thinking itself: causality. For if there is moral worth tied to sentience, how could there not also be moral worth tied to that biological unity which has a potency, grounded in the already existing life itself, for sentience? If, in fact, a person will not allow the harming of a little girl because he marvels at the little girl's capacity for joy, laughter, sorrow, and – that most human attribute – wonder, how could he not also desire to protect that little girl when she has not yet actualized her built-in potency for such capacities for joy, laughter, sorrow, and wonder?

The great irony, or, perhaps, the great tragedy, of this abuse of the word "person", is the mockery it attempts to make of that noble and dignified word. For the meaning of the word "person" itself developed out of Christian meditation on the Trinity. The Church Fathers asked: how could there be one divine nature, yet three distinct entities within that divine nature? The Church wrestled with that question – and still does – but progress was, slowly but surely, made: the entities were persons. And so, when it is said that the human is made in the image and likeness of God, the revolution which the Gospel spread to those it baptized was powered by the fundamental belief that the human being was a person, made for relationality, made for love, in the same way that God Himself is a relationality, in the same way that God Himself is Love.

If children are to be accepted not as burdens but as gifts, then so too should the unborn. If, in fact, we are to treat, individually, in our own spiritualities, human life as a gift – we must also recognize in other human lives, no matter how small or how weak, the same rights which we trust we have ourselves.

Ecstasy

The best conversations are those conversations with friends, for it is only with friends – true friends – that we can enjoy life for what it is. Analogously, the best conversations are those conversations focused not on rhetorical skill or domineering bursts of logic, but rather on a jointly-accepted obedience to the true things, desire for the good things, and the enjoyment of the beautiful things. In these true conversations between these true friends, there is a mutual surrender to the other. 

Unfortunately, what keeps us from these conversations, from these communal acts of creation, meditation, contemplation, or reflection, is almost always the fear that if we truly do forget ourselves, that we would lose ourselves. However, forgetting ourselves is precisely the nature of true bliss because forgetting ourselves is precisely the nature of true love: losing ourselves in that which is greater than ourselves. The great paradox of relationality, of authentic human living, is that man is most himself when he is most forgetful of himself. 

"For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it." – The Gospel of St. Matthew, Chapter 16, Verse 25

The Dignity of Human Life

I will briefly sketch out some key propositions which I hold to be fundamental foundations of my world-view. However, I do not think these are fundamental foundations of only my world-view. Rather, I think that anybody raised in a culture which, even if no longer dominantly Judeo-Christian, has been formed and influenced, to some extent, by Judeo-Christian morality, will recognize these propositions as shaping their outlook on the meaning of life, politics, etc.

1. "Human life has inherent dignity". Whether a person is an atheist, an agnostic, a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or a Vegan (just kidding), the idea that human life has inherent dignity so saturates our culture that identifying it as a fundamental foundation of said person's world-view is akin to a fish discovering it's in water. It's simply taken for granted. However, this has not historically been the case in non-Christian cultures, and even nominally Christian cultures struggled greatly with dehumanizing practices such as slavery – although the authentically Christian elements always interacted with such evils to produce grave moral tension which, eventually, led, uniquely among world cultures, the Christian West to abolish slavery absolutely.

However, the naturalism, materialism, and anti-humanism which is prevalent in our culture and intelligentsia today, of their very natures, lend themselves to a rejection of this fundamental proposition. Indeed, one cannot defend the proposition that "Human life has inherent dignity" without first defending the proposition that "Human beings are, clearly, in some way exceptional among the beings in the universe." One of the most common beliefs among "thinkers" in our age is that human beings aren't exceptional.

Instead, "nothing more"-ism abounds (the sophisticated term is "materialist reductionism"). It's claimed that "human beings are nothing more than apes with highly developed frontal cortexes" or that "human minds are nothing more than human brains, which themselves are nothing more than collections of atoms randomly bouncing around". Another stock "nothing more"-ism: "morality is nothing more than the evolution of social norms to encourage behavior successful to the transmission of genes within a social group".

It seems that the modern thinker uses this "nothing more"-ism not as a tangible starting point for developing a rational, coherent world-view, but rather as a sort of universal acid to dismantle any possibility of a rational, coherent world-view. Oftentimes, this is most prevalent in discussions of sexual morality. Whereas religious people – and other people who, in general, are in love with love – proclaim the beauty and the sacredness of the marital act, those who would rather have no bounds or limits on their sexual powers or faculties often devolve themselves into defending an interpretation of the marital act as "nothing more than two people exchanging oxytocin".

However, we all immediately revolt against this universal acid of materialist reductionism the moment it is applied to something we care about. Tell a committed leftist that his political opinions are nothing more than "random collections of neuron firing which don't actually mean anything because, well, nothing really means anything, really, since all anything is mindless matter engaging in an undirected, deterministic causal chain which nothing can change". Either the socialist will agree and therefore put down her hammer and sickle-emblazoned flag and join in your nihilism or she will immediately react against it, insisting on some fundamental principle that gives meaning to her life.

In other words, materialist reductionism, which is nothing more than the logical consequence of the belief that "all that exists is mindless matter", is a view nobody actually holds; nobody lives out materialist reductionism because there simply is nothing to live out.

And yet, this kind of language is often used to react against uses of the mind to come to certain truths about the existence of God, the existence of a natural, universal, and objective moral law, and the existence of applications of said moral law to the realm of human sexuality.

Thus, what I hope I have made clear is that such reductionism is simply intellectually feeble. And thus, objections to human exceptionalism based on reductionism fail.

Indeed, that the human person is truly exceptional among the things and beings in the universe is a truth which requires no extensive tome; it's perhaps the most obvious fact of existence (aside from the fact that existence is). Human persons, unique in the universe, have immaterial minds and immaterial free wills. Our intuition that human life possesses inherent dignity stems precisely from this most obvious fact of existence. The human person, in short, is a miracle. The human mind can grasp intentions, meaning, universals, propositions, mathematics, logic, etc. – all of which go into that most human, most ingenious, property: language. The human will can redirect causal chains of determinate matter in accordance with it.

It is from these two traits of the human being, his mind and his free will, that we can begin to sketch out an objective moral code, because it is from the human being's mind and will, whether fully actualized in development or not, that the human being possesses inherent and objective moral worth.

Thus, one can deduce objective moral truths from this fact of existence – that man possesses an immaterial mind capable of attaining truth and a genuinely free will – without ever invoking God.

However, man is a curious animal. He always wants to delve deeper into the mystery of existence and so he asks how it is possible that man possesses properties which are utterly distinct from the material world, although obviously, in some sense, dependent on and capable of an influence of, the material world. Indeed, this is where the Judeo-Christian understanding of the human person comes into view: man is made in the image and likeness of God. No other solution suffices. Immaterial things cannot come from material things, and so any attempt at a sort of "emergentist" explanation ("evolution and natural selection somehow led to collections of matter which are capable are immaterial properties") is dead-on-arrival. However, that the human person is made in the image and likeness of God gives an answer to this great mystery, and, combined with the necessity of a moral lawgiver for a moral law, connects man and God in a unique relationship, that of two persons, two minds interacting.

Thus, the argument being sketched out here is as follows:

1. Materialist reductionist attempts to disprove human exceptionalism fail.
2. Human life has an inherent dignity because humans are exceptional.
3. Human exceptionalism is true because humans uniquely, in the universe, possess immaterial minds and free wills.
4. Being immaterial, minds and wills, cannot come from material causes.
5. Therefore, minds and wills come from immaterial causes.
6. God is an immaterial cause. Furthermore, it can be shown via various arguments that God is the ultimate cause, of things both immaterial and material.
7. Therefore, God is the ultimate cause of minds and will.
8. Putting 3 and 7 together, God is the ultimate cause of human exceptionalism.
9. Putting 2 and 8 together, God is the ultimate reason why human life has inherent dignity.
10. Rejecting God has led modern man to, ultimately, reject the inherent dignity of human life. 

Virtue, Paganism, and Nihilism

Man's response to the reality of death determines, fundamentally, his worldview. The natural response, at least the first, most intuitive natural response, to death is fear. Man fears that there is nothing after death, that after death, his person ceases to exist, his identity ceases to exist. All of his thoughts, memories, and joys no longer exist. This, of course, is the logical conclusion of the naturalism and materialism which grips so many today; whether their assent to materialism and naturalism is implicit or explicit, this logical conclusion of those philosophies – annihilation of the person upon dying – is the great fear, the ever-present alpha and omega of modern man's despair. While everyone comes face to face with the reality of death, the vast majority react naturally against dwelling on it or contemplating it. I am in no position, of course, to judge whether or not this reaction is healthy or unhealthy.

So, then, what is a man to do with this fear, with this dread of annihilation? It seems to me that there exist two options, two possible ways forward, two possible approaches to life and living, from this dread. (Unless, there is, just maybe, a Way, a Truth, and a Life – perhaps, even, a Savior?).

The first option rejects the existence of objective morality and lives a life of subjectivism, in which I simply chase pleasures, avoid any unnecessary pain, and create my own values and moral compass. Inevitably, this sort of approach depends on me strengthening my will so as to dominate over the wills of those around me. It requires me to always stay within myself and my own person, refusing to give myself to others to any extent which won't result in a "gain" for me; if I don't deem it to increase my contentment, I won't do it. So, that's the first option; I can reject the existence of objective morality, depend solely on my own valuations, live solely for my own contentment, and live, always, truly alone, for I have rejected the existence of morality because I have rejected the existence of any eternal personhood. Since the persons around me are finite beings, why care for them? It makes far more sense to care for myself since, even though I too am a mere finite being, at least I can experience my own consciousness (whereas I cannot experience others') and so I can only experience my own pleasures and feel my own pains.

Interestingly, this refusal for true relationality with other persons is precisely what Pope Benedict XVI, in his Introduction to Christianity describes as Hell itself: eternal rebellion against relation with other persons, eternal desire, fulfilled, for autonomy and loneliness. And is this not what we intuitively know about demons, about evil? Evil abhors company, does it not? You don't hear of demons coming together to throw a party, do you? How could they? They're always desiring things for themselves, always rushing because they're in the despair that if they don't get it, someone else will; they're living eternally in the belief that this is a zero-sum world, that all I am to do is use things and people around me for pleasure.

The second option is to believe in the existence of an objective morality. This I would call the "virtuous pagan" option. I would reject a belief in the supernatural, a belief in God, or even a belief in the immortality of the soul. However, I would *not* reject the idea that a man's life consists of living well and living well consists of living in accordance with virtue, and living in accordance with virtue consists of living a life of moderation, meaning living a life centered between extremes. The natural development of this train of thought reaches its most noble point with Stoicism. One is to live in accordance with nature, even though one cannot know the existence of God, say, or even the objective existence of a moral code with certainty. However, the other option is to be rejected (the life of hedonism, the life of selfishness, the life of Hell itself). Therefore, the best option is to live a life of service to one's fellow man, even if one does not have the full understanding as to why that is. It is to live a life of controlling one's emotions, controlling one's desires, rejecting the fruits of one's labors and simply focusing on the ever-present now. It is, in a short, a life of, as Flannery O'Connor puts it, "domesticating despair and learning to live with it".

However, there is a fundamental flaw with this option; despair can never be truly domesticated. Despair is powerful and always finds a way to get into man's mind, a man's will, or a man's soul (assuming, for the sake of argument, that this soul is not immortal but simply the full life-principle of the man). Despair cannot be domesticated because it is such a powerful state of being that only a constantly controlling will is able to keep it subdued, but a constantly controlling will struggles without itself having a focus on something other than mere negation; it requires a pursuit of a positive aim, a positive goal. Therefore, the only way out of despair is to fixate one's mind, will, and soul on some positive thing. This, of course, can lead to an addiction, which is why virtue is necessary, for virtue insists that man avoid extremes and live a life of the mean. For me, this positive thing would be, say, "finding the cure for cancer". The other options, "enjoy as much sexual pleasure as possible", "eat delicious foods", "become famous and popular", are intriguing but wouldn't be in accord with living a life of natural virtue, since they all would rip activities (such as sex, eating, and influence/leadership) out of their naturally ordered ends (procreation, nourishment, and service) and become, unnaturally, ends in and of themselves. Since the Stoic life is to live a life according to nature, these options would not work. On the contrary, "finding a cure for cancer" has its ultimate end the reduction of suffering in human life and the prolonging of human life, which seems to be a virtuous end, but only if one question can be answered: why is human life valuable?

Now, we have arrived at the key question, indeed the ultimate question. One can say that, even if one cannot say clearly why human life is valuable, it is definitely clear that this whole chain of reasoning, this entire pursuit of finding a coherent worldview with which to approach life, is impossible if human life did not exist. It is, in effect, to simply say that, regardless of the *value* of human life, the *existence* of human life, and in particular *my* human life, is a brute fact of reality, the fundamental axiom of being, and therefore the starting point of all reasoning. I am sure you see that this is a rather tenuous, if not completely vacuous, position upon which man can build his worldview. When confronted with the ultimate question, the question that matters more than anything else, the only possible answer is: "Well, the answer to the ultimate question is that, without the subject of the ultimate question, the ultimate question cannot be asked." It is unsatisfactory because the answer is that there is no answer; the question, therefore, is actually meaningless and cannot be asked. If this is true, then, if it is true that there is no answer to this ultimate question, this train of thought, this being a "virtuous pagan", seems to collapse into the same primacy of the will which characterizes the first option, which entailed rejecting the existence of objective morality and instead replacing it with the will to live, the will to survive, and the will to consume.

However, because the virtuous pagan is virtuous, he or she cannot accept that alternative, and instead simply must live on the intuition that there is, surely, some good in the world and so the only real option is to live and fight for that good, even if that good cannot be concretely objectively known. It is, in short, a life of simply not asking the deepest questions, and instead focusing on whatever present reality is at hand, always going from one purpose to another, always solving one problem after another.

And yet, his mind does not cease asking this question, this question of the value of human life, of the meaning of human life. He finds it thrust into his consciousness at the cinema, at the opera, at the bar, at the wedding, at the baby shower, at the birth of a new human, at the divorce, at the graduation, at the voting booth, at the emergency room, and, finally, at the funeral. He cannot escape the question as he interacts with the mentally ill. He cannot escape it as he views with disgust, revulsion, and anger those heinous acts against the dignity and sanctity of human life. It will not leave him.

And so, to assuage the restless mind which seeks answers to the deepest questions, man resigns himself to simply corralling and controlling the mind, reining in its desire for a Truth which either cannot be known or, even worse, does not exist. Thus, the Stoic, this most virtuous pagan, meets the Buddhist, that most virtuous nihilist. The virtuous pagan meditates, focusing his mind and will on the most basic and primal part of physical human life: the breath. In so doing, he strengthens their ability to focus on one thought and, in doing so, to identify thoughts which could lead to the mental anguish, the mental despair he so desperately seeks to avoid, and attempt to annihilate them by, in the end, annihilating his very ego, his very person, his very Self. Thus, the man has already died. No longer does death have a hold over him, for there is no longer a "him". With this death of Self, he can enjoy the world as a cosmic game, as a cosmic illusion.

Or, maybe, just maybe, what I have here raised is a false dilemma: maybe we have a Savior, who points the way to Eternal Life, Eternal Bless, Eternal Relation with Being Itself.