Truth, Goodness, and Beauty

Most Catholics know about the "transcendentals" of truth, goodness and beauty. They are the eternal realities that are above and beyond the simple mundane things that we experience in daily life. You cannot see truth, or goodness, or beauty, but you can see and experience things that are true, things that are good, and things that are beautiful.

Because these are universally unavoidable realities, the devil wants to encourage people to reject them. He wants people to seek their opposites. Thus, Satan will promote lies, evil, and ugliness. The first two have been pushed on the world for most of her history, but the third transcendental, "beauty", is now being attacked in ways that have never before even been imagined.

Beauty is an objective reality, and although some people want to deny it, some things are beautiful and some things are not. Beauty is not in any ultimate sense "in the eye of the beholder". You cannot truthfully say that something which is ugly is beautiful, or that something which is beautiful is ugly. Moral relativism will make it seem like you can, but it is the same as saying "2 + 2 = 5". The words are there, but they are a lie, and therefore they are evil, and thus they are also ugly. We might not understand what beauty is (like a person might not understand truth or goodness), but that does not mean it is impossible to figure out.

Today the attack on the foundation of beauty is fully underway. Some people actually are seeking to promote that which is genuinely ugly as normal, and they want the world to make any sense of beauty to be completely subjective. I do not believe I need to point out how this is done, but the fact that we are becoming accustomed to it shows that they are succeeding. We must resist. We must teach our children what beauty is and help them to defend it.

Truth, goodness and beauty are tied up with one another. You can distinguish them, but they cannot be fully separated. That which attacks and destroys beauty, is just like that which attacks and destroys either truth or goodness. If it is a lie, we need to speak against it and help others to know it. If it is evil, we need to speak against it and help others to know it. If it is ugly, we need to speak against it (not with hate or pride, but with humble love, even if it is hard to do so) and help others to know it.