My mother has been listening to Stephen Turley on YouTube, and she found some lectures (and what seems like a sermon) by him, talking about classical times/things and the Good, True and Beautiful. It was somewhat about where the idea of them came from in the West, and how they relate to living well as a Christian.
I was given an assignment to write about what I liked about The Lord of the Rings, in an attempt to remember who I am. For awhile I didn't even know how to do it; kind of like writer's block, but related to a specific topic. Then at some point in the last week my mother turned on one of his lectures on this, relating these things to his Orthodox faith, and I remembered this is why I liked the story.
To me, Truth, Goodness and Beauty are basically reality. Ultimately anything that is worth doing in life is true, good and beautiful. It was wonderful to hear him describe what these things mean, too, as it very much reminded me why Tolkien's world meant so much to me. It led me to see that what I loved most is actually part of the real world... it let me believe what I wanted to believe: that life is meaningful and purposeful.
Here's the mental mess of what is currently striking me about these three things:
1. They either have an interrelationship, or else they are three levels or aspects of the same thing; like three planes of the same thing (dimensions, I guess). Either they necessitate each other; where one of them is, so are the others, in some way or other. My brain kind of visualises this as that they all modify each other. Truth is good, goodness is true, beauty is good, beauty is true, truth is beautiful, so on and so forth.
2. Truth is not 'facts' (or at least not only them), but is Reality and What Things Are. It's not, in my mind, knowledge at all, but rather what we learn about. I see truth like the law that is in fact written in the language of existence. All the nature of things is Truth. Truth is all the is-ness of things. Truth is assumed to exist whether or not any human knows the truth about a thing or not. It is a thing-outside-of-us we can learn about gradually as we live and humble ourselves to open ourselves to what we see.
3. Goodness is about telos- purpose. A thing is good if it is fulfilling its purpose, outlined in Truth (which to me seems to be at least related to Law). A good marriage is good because it is aligned with the definition (whether Man knows it or not) of marriage. Complete goodness in any thing and the world is whole and rich; every thing in the world is complex in how it relates to other things and helps to fulfill their purpose. The one-ness of reality is the dance of the parts with each other in perfect harmony.
4. Beauty is what flows out of these. Things being how they ought to be is beautiful. Turley said that it is through Beauty (the aesthetic of the True and Good) that we see and are drawn to the True and the Good. Maybe Beauty is just how True and Good things appear (when we can see Beauty; I think we blind ourselves to it often), but I've often wondered if Beauty is actually more fundamental.
Next post I'm going to rant on Beauty a bit.
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