Beauty Truth Goodness The Fundamentals Of Catholicism

[Jeannine Lander]

Wewant our students to maximize their human potential and to both be good and do good in authentic freedom. In order to do this, our students need to be able to know how to wisely and fully apprehend and interrogate all aspects of reality from a solid Christian intellectual tradition. This intellectual tradition involves not just teaching facts and skills, but is also essentially focused on seeking to know the value and nature of things and in appreciating the value of knowledge for its own sake.

One method of assisting students to keep focus on these aspects of Catholic intellectual inquiry is to use the lenses of truth, goodness, and beauty to evaluate a subject under consideration. These three elements are often understood as being among the transcendentals. Transcendentals are the timeless and universal attributes of being.3 They are the properties of all beings. They reflect the divine origin of all things and the unity of all truth and reality in God. These elements are among the deepest realities. They help unite men across time and culture and are often a delight to explore and discuss, because they are substantive to our very nature.

The following simple definitions and essential questions are provided as a general framework to help facilitate a discussion on any topic in any subject. The goal is not to generate easy questions for easy answers, but to generate foundational questions for deep inquiry into the value and nature of things, to instill a sense of the intrinsic value of knowledge, and to elicit a sense of wonder.

As Catholic educators, our goal is to help our students to become good persons. Among those qualities we deem good are wisdom, faithfulness, and virtue. Virtue is a habitual and firm disposition to do the good.12 We are free to the extent that with the help of others, we have maximized these goods, these proper powers and perfections as man.13 Such efforts raise fundamental questions of what it means to be human and our relationships with each other, the created world, and God.

God, through reason and revelation, has not left us blind on these issues, nor has He left us up to our own subjective devices. It is a fundamental responsibility of the Catholic school to teach and pass on this Catholic culture, this Catholic worldview, this cultural patrimony, these insights, and these very fundamental truths about the good and what constitutes the good life.14 Particularly, in this and all our efforts as Catholic educators, we build our foundation of the good on Jesus Christ, who is the perfect man, and who fully reveals man to himself.15

A simple definition for truth is the mind being in accord with reality.16 We seek always to place our students and ourselves in proper relationship with the truth. Nothing we do can ever be opposed to the truth, that is, opposed to reality which has its being in God. Catholics hold that when our senses are in good condition and functioning properly under normal circumstances, and when our reason is functioning honestly and clearly, we can come to know reality and have the ability to make true judgments about reality. Through study, reflection, experimentation, argument and discussion, we believe that an object under discussion may manifest itself in its various relations, either directly or indirectly, to the mind.17

One of the great hallmarks of the Catholic intellectual tradition, of course, is the understanding that faith and reason must work together, each making its own unique contribution and serving as a necessary check on the other, in order to come to an understanding of the truth. After centuries of a modern world trying to understand truth on the basis of reason alone, what do we have now in the post-modern world? Neither faith nor reason is a source of truth; rather, truth itself is privatized, a matter of private opinion by which I am entitled to live and which everyone else is obliged to respect. So, in the quest for truth, the long arc of Western history has moved from faith and reason, to reason alone and not faith, to neither faith nor reason but only will to power.

The timelessness of sacred beauty gives it the power to lift us out of the world of time and give us a glimpse of that which transcends time, of what ultimately lasts, of what our goal and our final home is: ultimately, the reality of God. A key to the path of renewal of both Church and society, then, is to recapture the importance of beauty, to recognize its universality, and its power to evangelize and open hearts to the truth.

A modern internet phenomenon where a person is ejected from influence or fame by questionable actions. It is caused by a critical mass of people who are quick to judge and slow to question. It is commonly caused by an accusation, whether that accusation has merit or not. It is a direct result of the ignorance of people caused [by] communication technologies outpacing the growth in available knowledge of a person.[1]

Was not our Lord ejected from influence because he posed a threat to the worldly power of the governing authorities and the leaders of his own people? Were not the people quick to judge without thinking things through, including even the scholars of the Law who should have known better? Do we not see here a growing mob mentality that erupts in violence against an innocent man? This is the story on the human level.

However, this is also the same story we are seeing played out before our eyes today. What do the cancelers really want to cancel out? It is far more than those who disagree with them. The real activists are seeking to discredit the great protagonists of Western civilization, both in the history of our country and of our Church.

Beauty, though, is a bit harder to cancel, as witnessed, again, by the sadness of the entire world at the burning of Notre Dame de Paris, not to mention all of the other great medieval cathedrals of Europe to which people from all over the world have come for almost a millennium to admire, and to this day are reduced to silence with their timeless beauty.

Let us tell the truth about the past as we strive for a better future, but let that truth include the sublime examples of Catholic heroes, which we not only need to tell as history but also express in the arts and even in the liturgy.

We do not know our own history as Catholics in our own country. One goal of the Catholic university is to be the place where scholars and artists come together to tell our own stories of our own place here, not only in history but also in art, literature, music, poetry, painting. We must tell the truth of course, but in that truth we must never neglect the beauty and goodness our faith has inspired.

As you know, Greek thought and the Greek language were the predominant cultural influence in the world of the time, much like the English language and American culture are in the world of our time. So this is the next step in building from that blueprint: Greeks being the great philosophers that they were, the early Church Fathers understood how to translate Semitic thought into categories of Greek philosophy in order to bring the Gentiles to salvation in Christ.

Then, when Rome became Christian, the Church was able to avail herself of the physical and social infrastructure of the Roman Empire that had spread all throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Thus the third stop: the roads and law and governing models of the Roman Empire are what gave the Church the infrastructure she needed to build a common Christian community all throughout the world.

I would, then, like to shift the attention in my presentation now to the closely related topic of forming students in virtue, and, of all of the classic virtues, to focus on two that are of particular importance because they are both foundational and the most countercultural, even despised, of the virtues in our contemporary society. That is not as true of all of the classic virtues, at least in concept. Courage, for example, still has its admirers. Wisdom as a concept is not shunned. What, though, are the two key and indispensable and now derided virtues your students need to cultivate in order to fulfill their God-given vocation in life and attain holiness?

True, humility by itself is not enough. However, without helping students practice the virtue of humility, that is, the three convictions I just mentioned, we leave out the most important foundation for all learning. So, humility alone is insufficient, but without it, learning is impossible. And not only learning, but every other human and theological virtue, including the one for which everyone is yearning in the deepest core of their being, and so often search for in the wrong places: love.

The narcissistic obsession with the cult of self we are now witnessing in the culture is, I believe, a symptom of a very deep insecurity and loneliness in our society. People are yearning for love, intimacy and companionship, yet very often fail to attain it. It is clearly true that many people are incapable of, or at least not disposed toward, persevering in a committed relationship in their life.

Which leads us to the other foundational virtue, the one which more than any other is abhorred by the contemporary culture and so the one where we find the greatest challenge of all to instill: chastity.

Practical activity will always be insufficient, unless it visibly expresses a love for the human person, a love nourished by an encounter with Christ. My deep personal sharing in the needs and sufferings of others becomes a sharing of my very self with them: if my gift is not to prove a source of humiliation, I must give to others not only something that is my own, but my very self; I must be personally present in my gift.[8]

However, while these virtues serve the good of the individual, leading the individual down the path that leads toward eternal salvation, we know that they also serve the good of society as a whole. Some of you may be familiar with the work of Alana Newman, a young lady who was the product of IVF. She speaks about the personal harm she suffered not knowing who her biological father was, and all that she tried to do to track him down in order to know her connection to her heritage, how she has had self-destructive tendencies and felt that she had no value. She also speaks about the negative consequences to society when fathers become disposable, which, as we know, happens in a whole lot of other ways as well. Pope Francis has also not been reticent to emphasize the importance of the role of the father in the family, such as the following which he spoke in one of his Wednesday General Audience addresses:

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