Truth and Goodness? Yes, but we must not forget Beauty.
By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Oct 18, 2024
I was struck by a column by Liel Leibovitz in the November issue of First Things (Radical Ick) which observes that the ideological posturing of today’s college radicals is far more nihilistic than was the free-love movement of my own collegiate era. There is a difference between demanding free love along with an end to the military-industrial complex and rejecting the reality of the human person (or any reality outside of our own imaginative desires).
But unlike Leibovitz, I am not convinced this shift means the current generation is significantly more evil than the previous one, since so many drifting collegians simply assert their independence by mimicking and exaggerating the peculiarities of the more fashionable professors. And believe me, even college students (who are, after all, relatively clueless) have an instinctive sense of which ideas are fashionable.
You won’t find nearly as much of that sort of naïve posturing among blue-collar youth: Ideological discontent tends to be a privilege of society’s elites, the same elites (and those who yearn to be among them) who typically control government, mass media, and higher education. But Leibovitz’s observations recalled to mind the argument advanced by Hilaire Belloc in his book Survivals and New Arrivals, subtitled “Old and New Enemies of the Catholic Church”. If I recall correctly, Belloc pointed out that we (you and I) tend to continue fighting the same battles in our sixties and seventies as we were fighting in our twenties and thirties—that is, we are often fixated on the issues which we engaged in our prime, and are slow to notice that new threats might be more important to address, or old threats might now be addressed in more effective ways, as we grow old.
This is one reason each new generation of even reasonably good Christians tends to identify different root problems, while the older generation may not recognize the wisdom of the shift in emphasis. To take but one example, it was very hard in the 1960s and 1970s to get parents to recognize the importance of choosing genuinely sound colleges and universities for their children. They were just happy to have won the military battle against the Nazis and to stay even with the Communists, and were very slow to recognize that the explosion of relativism in the universities was in some ways an even greater threat. They took for granted that they had won their fight through physical warfare.
Shifts in our own mental world
The current Catholic veterans of the ongoing ideological warfare within the modern West (and, indeed, around the world) may not be quite so naïve about ”new threats” for the simple reason that we are continuing to lose ground. We cannot look back at anything and say, “done and dusted”. Even if we have not experienced the pain of a military defeat, we have never been able to breathe that sigh of relief that comes with a military victory. Never was it more true and less-recognized that, as Walt Kelly said through the comic-strip character Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us”.1 But except insofar as we are all sinners, the enemy is not all of us. And Belloc’s point may still be valid—not only in determining what enemy we must fight but also in learning how to fight that enemy.
For example, in about the fifth or sixth year of the Catholic academic journal Faith & Reason (which I started in the late 1970s), I polled readers on the question of whether we ought to be devoting attention not only to faulty ideologies and arguments but to culture, literature, and the other arts. The answer was overwhelmingly negative; the arts were deemed frivolous, a distraction from the real battles. Yet today on CatholicCulture.org, two of our podcasts deal with the arts, and when the next generation (in the form of Thomas Mirus) writes about movies with religious themes, those posts get more clicks than almost anything else.
Clearly Catholics today are developing a keener sense of the formative power of the arts, as compared with my own generation, which was focused almost exclusively on the new and very bad philosophical and theological propositions and ideas which haunted the Church. In my circles back then, if some presentation did not state a falsehood in black-and-white—that is, did not contain a propositional falsehood—it was deemed frivolous to examine it. After all, we already had our hands full with important problems.
Even to this day I still default to that viewpoint. I find that I must deliberately stop and think about it to recognize the reality of what is at least partly a generational shift. My parents, who lived in a fairly stable culture, would have sounded the alarm over a military attack and emphasized military preparedness; serious Catholics of my generation were more prone to sound the alarm over false doctrine within the Church and the need for sound doctrinal education; my children are far more likely to recognize the dangers (and the possibilities) inherent in the formative power of the arts, especially as transmitted to others through the media.
A battle for the imagination
As Leibovitz acknowledges with his emphasis on the current generation’s dangerous divorce from reality, we are now in a battle over not just how to make things better in the real world but whether it is possible to seek happiness through an imagined world. To my parents’ generation of Catholics, this new question would not have made any sense at all. To my generation of Catholics, it highlights an obvious new problem which, for the most part, we have not even tried to address in imaginative terms. But to the next generation after mine—now in the fullness of responsible adulthood—it will almost certainly become a highly-developed skill to fight the war over imagination not just vigorously but imaginatively.
This argues, of course, for a rebirth in all the arts, and a fresh deployment of their power, so that the true and the good may be inculcated by the beautiful. It is certainly a logical progression, but it is also a logic that is easy to forget. Though I am no expert, I believe a quiet revival has been going on among Catholic architects and artists in all media. The time is certainly ripe for a greater deployment of recovered and new-found beauty.
Sadly, all the transcendentals can be mimicked through their opposites: The true can be counterfeited with clever falsehood; the good can be counterfeited by specious justifications of evil; and the beautiful can be counterfeited by a superficial impact on the senses that actually conveys a deeper ugliness. Nonetheless, going forward, we will have to try very hard to deploy all three more effectively, with increasing awareness of their connections to one another.
Belloc also wrote that the grace of God is in courtesy, which is another form of beauty. It appears he was almost habitually attuned to the values which, motivated by love, ought to lie at the heart of our interests, our deportment, our speech, our work, our achievements, and our offerings. We must argue for the True. We must exemplify the Good. And we must place a fresh emphasis on the Beautiful to reconnect a fallen world with God.
1 Hold your emails! Yes, I know that this expression is reported to have first appeared on an Earth Day poster in 1970. And that both are ultimately drawn from Oliver Hazard Perry‘s famous military dispatch in a naval battle on Lake Erie in the War of 1812, stating that “We have met the enemy and they are ours. Two ships, two brigs, one schooner and one sloop.“
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