Renew The Church! – website and Blog

I’ve been talking with atheists and agnostics recently. It is so clear that faith is a gift! Unbelievers challenge me with the demand, “Prove that there is a God!” – Or that there is an afterlife, or absolute moral right and wrong, or that truth itself exists. They cannot even see, since they believe we accidentally evolved slithering out of slime and chaos, that “the beautiful” could be anything more than that which is pleasing for them to look at. Perhaps we can help them to look again, and more closely.

There is beauty, and goodness, and truth. And love exists. And when a person is able to see that there is more than futility, accident and death, he can begin to see past his own eyes to things that exist apart from him, that existed before him and that will endure beyond him. These transcendental realities invite us all to transcend ourselves. And if a person can hear the invitation of truth, and of beauty, and of goodness, perhaps he will pause for a moment and to catch a glimpse of what lies beyond the surfaces of things to things interior, at the foundations, within and under the dimensions of the material and the temporal. Perhaps first he looks toward God, and later to Him.

Some, even among atheists and agnostics, if they do possess a love for truth, will never stop looking until they see. We might be more helpful to atheists and agnostics if we stop pointing them to things that they cannot see, but instead to things that they can see. Maybe we should stop quoting Scripture to them that they are deaf to, and stop urging them to try to see what only eyes of faith can see, and instead point them to values God set into place for all men: transcendent values of truth, goodness, beauty, love – signs that point to Him. Then maybe later, they will see the more beyond the signs.

Beauty is a common word, but it has suffered shrinkage in our aesthetically challenged world. Some who live on the surfaces of life (even while feeling imprisoned in doing so) lead us to wonder to ourselves, “Do you not see the beauty there?” We wonder further, “How can you see the beauty there and just keep walking!” Some do see such beauty “there” (somewhere – anywhere) that it affects them, moves them, changes them irreversibly. Others, deadened within, say “Sure, oh yeah, of course. Very nice.” And they keep walking. But the man who does see – he stops walking for a bit because something is owed in return, when such a gift of seeing the beautiful is received.

There is something holy about the good, and the beautiful, and the true. Its holiness demands something of us. We owe something in return, not merely because the gift is pleasing to us and gives some passing momentary pleasure. No, the good and the beautiful and the true have a transparency to something greater than themselves, and they thereby invite us to something greater than ourselves.

Humanity is, today, in a place of deep confusion. Before his elevation to pope, Card. Ratzinger (homily in Mass before the Conclave, 2005) preached about the errors and dangers of relativism:

To have a clear faith, according to the creed of the Church, is often labeled as fundamentalism. While relativism, that is, allowing oneself to be carried about with every wind of “doctrine,” seems to be the only attitude that is fashionable. A dictatorship of relativism is being constituted that recognizes nothing as absolute and which only leaves the “I” and its whims as the ultimate measure.

Consider the distortion to these transcendental values of truth, goodness and beauty, in a culture under the sway of relativism:

Truth is not recognized as an attribute of God in Jesus Christ (“I am the way and the truth and the life”), nor even as an eternally existing and absolute reality independent of any human perception of it. Rather, “truth” is what “I” agree with and define to be true. What is true for me can be different from what is true for you, because there is no absolute truth.

Goodness is not recognized as grounded in the goodness of God (“No one is good, but God alone.”), nor even merely as a good common to all men for all times. There is no absolute good. Rather, goodness is what is good for me, what pleases me, what satisfies me. What is good for me might be very different from what is good for you, since we all have different tastes.

Beauty is not recognized as the eternal radiance of the eternally true and good (“I am the good Shepherd” is literally, “I am the Shepherd the beautiful.”). Rather, in the world of relativism, there is no beauty beyond what is aesthetically pleasing in some way to me. As for truth and goodness, for beauty it is the individual and his subjective preference that defines beauty and what is beautiful.

Thus in today’s world, the center of gravity of reality has shifted from the world in which I have been created and placed, to a world inside of me, to my perceptions and preferences and pleasures. To say that something is good, or true, or beautiful is to say something about me and what I think and judge, not about the thing outside of and independent of me. To see something beautiful is “really” to say, “When I look at that, I feel beauty in myself.” (See, for example, C.S. Lewis and The Abolition of Man.) Thus, the man of relativism is actually saying, “When I look at that thing I am beautiful.” It is all about me.

Of course, for all its self-centeredness and egoism, such relativism is not a bold assertion of actual self-importance and strength, but an admission of extreme poverty and loneliness. Such an aesthetic is bankrupt, and reveals even while being denied, an empty bravado and the terror of ultimate unimportance. The loudest ones among us have so little to say. The ones all self-centered are standing on nothing more substantial than their own poor and weak and transient thoughts – ideas – that can vanish in a moment. They possess nothing beyond the phantoms and fleeting phantasms of their minds, and are thus the most needy of all.

What are we to do? We need to become more prayerful, if we would be credible witnesses of an interior life more solid than the empty counterfeit that modernity offers. We need to walk and live ever aware of the eternal realities, and we need to stand on them, reverence them, indeed we need to return to them – to Him – their due. That is, truth and beauty and goodness deserve something of all of us because they point us by design to God. In Him we are to remain, and all that we are therefore ought to reflect His truth, beauty and goodness. All that we do ought to repay Him with human acts that are also good, true and beautiful. And if we, being then credible witnesses, point others to goodness and truth and beauty beyond what the unbeliever has thought and known under relativism, perhaps something will resonate in him. Perhaps he will stop walking and look again, listen again, and see anew. Perhaps he will be touched by and risk the invitation to transcendence, even by way of you or me. Faith is a gift – often received through the hands and loving patience of another.