‘Truth, beauty and goodness’

And the hardest of these is goodness

Peter Carruthers 

Sunrise, Herefordshire, November 2023. Photo: S P Carruthers.

This is the first of my promised follow-up articles to my review of Rod Dreher’s ‘Benedict Option’ and ‘Live not by Lies’.

In Chapter 5 of ‘Benedict’, Dreher sets out a programme for a ‘church for all seasons’, in particular for a church able to weather the coming storms and survive the new ‘dark age’. Such a church, Dreher avers, must ‘rediscover the past’, ‘recover liturgical worship’, ‘tighten church discipline’, ‘embrace exile and the possibility of martyrdom’ and ‘evangelise with goodness and beauty’. All these themes are worth exploring further, but it is to the last that I want to turn my attention here.

Dreher takes as his starting point the words of the German Roman Catholic theologian, Joseph Ratzinger, better known as the late Pope Benedict XVI, who once said, “art and the saints are the greatest apologetic for our faith”. “Great beauty and extraordinary goodness”, Dreher argues, bypass “our rational faculties and strike the heart”. 

Both Dreher and Ratzinger are calling for a ‘new apologetic’, shaped by beauty and goodness. However, neither is dismissing or downgrading truth. 

For Ratzinger, truth goes hand-in-hand with beauty and goodness. Their union is essential. The saints are a “great luminous trail on which God passed through history.” Christian art and music are “in a certain way proof of the truth of Christianity: heart and reason encounter one another, beauty and truth converge”.

For Dreher, “art and saints - material instantiations of beauty and goodness - prepare the way for propositional truth… The first Christians gained converts, not because their arguments were better than those of the pagans, but because people saw in them and their communities something good and beautiful - and they wanted it. This led them to the Truth”.¹

As Jesus said, it is not first by our arguments that people know we are His disciples, but by our love (John 14:35). Love embodies and crowns beauty, goodness and truth (1 Corinthians 13:4-8).

The idea of truth, beauty and goodness as primary forms, eternal values or ‘transcendentals’ goes back to the Greeks. Christian theology, however, has understood them as the ultimate desires of man, essential aspects of the nature of God, and virtues to be evident in the life of believers and embodied in the church. 

Just now, all three are under attack across much of our society and culture and even in our churches. Truth has “stumbled in the public squares” (Isaiah 59:14). Beauty has been misused, degraded, defiled (Ezekiel 16:25). Goodness has, in effect, been ‘redefined’ (Isaiah 5:20). 

As we seek to be faithful followers of Jesus, lights in the darkness and refuges in the storms of our current times, it seems to me that we would do well to take seriously Dreher and Ratzinger’s words and pay special attention to these three virtues. 

And, of the three, I suspect that goodness is going to be the most challenging in the days to come. As novelist, environmentalist and recent convert to Orthodox Christianity, Paul Kingsnorth writes:

“Modernity is not at all short on ideas, arguments, insults, ideologies, stratagems, conflicts, world-saving machines or clever TED talks. But it is very short on saints; and how we need their love, wisdom, discipline and stillness amidst the roaring of the Machine. Maybe we had better start looking at how to embody a little of it ourselves”.

Joseph Ratzinger saw this a long time ago. In a series of five speeches given on German radio in 1969, he set out his vision of the future of man and the Church. The last of these speeches, broadcast on Christmas Day, was remarkably prophetic. He saw the Church of the future as smaller, no longer with the structures and social privileges it built in its years of prosperity; it will start off with small groups and movements and a minority that will make faith central to experience again; it will be a more spiritual Church. And in its vanguard will be ‘saints’ - good, faithful, holy, humble followers of Christ.

“The future of the Church can and will issue from those whose roots are deep and who live from the pure fullness of their faith. It will not issue from those who accommodate themselves merely to the passing moment or from those who merely criticise others and assume that they themselves are infallible measuring rods; nor will it issue from those who take the easier road, who sidestep the passion of faith, declaring false and obsolete, tyrannous and legalistic, all that makes demands upon men, that hurts them and compels them to sacrifice themselves.

“To put this more positively: the future of the Church, once again as always, will be reshaped by saints, by men, that is, whose minds probe deeper than the slogans of the day, who see more than others see, because their lives embrace a wider reality.”

Ratzinger was, of course, seeing the future of his church, the Roman Catholic Church. But his words apply to all churches. And, while, in the years since, waves of renewal have indeed arisen from ‘small groups and movements’ across the denominations, his words remain as, or even more, apposite today.

Is there then any special role for rural Christians and rural contexts in this re-instating of beauty, goodness and truth? I believe there is. 

The beauty of nature and the essential goodness of creation are especially present in the countryside. The truth of God’s Godhead, glory and power is evidenced by the things He has made (Psalm 19:1; Romans 1:20). The rhythm of the seasons and the farming year speak of a good God’s loving provision for His creatures (Psalm 104:14-30). These things, interpreted by good and faithful saints manifesting God’s love through their love for one another, for their neighbours and even for the enemies, can provide that new-yet-ancient apologetic for our faith, which Dreher and Ratzinger are advocating. 

Like Kingsnorth, the rural writer, poet and early advocate of organic farming, H J Massingham (1888-1952) lamented the ‘triumph of the abstract over the concrete’, the uprooting of human thought and experience from nature, history and relationships. He saw this threatening civilisation with total disaster. “Has not modern Europe gone mad?”, he wrote (understandably) in 1942. For Massingham, the way out of the  “tyranny of the abstract which imprisons us” (roughly equivalent to Kingsnorth’s ‘Machine’) and “rediscovery of concrete experience”, is found in “the Christian faith, individual responsibility and the land”. ²

As the winds of change blow ever more strongly, many people today will, I believe, want to escape from the abstract ‘Machine’ and rediscover ‘concrete experience’. And there are those who are, or will be, turning to land and community, seeking out the beauty of nature in the countryside and in the art and architecture of old churches, taking individual responsibility (ie thinking and acting for themselves, and not just going with the flow), and seeking roots in history and heritage (which in our culture are ‘Christian’). Rural believers, with their rootedness in the land, need, I suggest, to be on hand to help such people in their quest, and ultimately lead them through these created things to the One who made and has redeemed us, and knowing whom is the only enduring ‘concrete experience’ (2 Corinthians 4:18; Hebrews 13:14).

“Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy—meditate on these things” (Philippians 4:8).

1. Dreher, Rod. The Benedict Option, Sentinel, New York, p 116

2. Massingham, H J. 1942. Remembrance. An autobiography.