Be Good!: Not Just Moral, But Beautiful

Bishop N.T. Wright of the Church on England is a great biblical scholar and I would recommend his writings to any Orthodox Christians.  Last week I started reading his SIMPLY CHRISTIAN: WHY CHRISTIANITY MAKES SENSE, a book not written for biblical scholars but written as an apology for Christianity directed to any in the Western world that may have turned away from Christianity. 

In his book he makes some comments on beauty and truth which got me thinking about the implications of what he wrote: 

“In fact, to identify beauty and truth… would be to take a large step toward what we now think of as the postmodern dilemma: the collapse of ‘truth’ altogether.  If beauty and truth are one and the same, then truth is different for everyone, for every age, and indeed for the same person from year to year. … What we must also rule out, along with any identification of beauty and truth, is the idea that beauty gives us direct access to God, to ‘the divine,’ or to a transcendent realm of any sort.” 

In the above statement Wright distinguishes between beauty and truth, seemingly to say that truth has an objectivity which beauty does not.   This is an assumption of the modern Western world but not one shared by all Christians.  And though Wright worries that identifying beauty and truth means accepting the postmodern dilemma of the collapse of truth, if I think about the 2004 movie CRASH, which I think is a postmodern morality tale, it seems to me that in the end of the movie there is recognition that there is such a thing as beauty which some of the characters experience in the freeing of the “Chinese” slaves, in the reconciliation of the TV director and his wife, in the Hispanic locksmith’s family, in the DA’s wife realization of what her Hispanic housekeeper really means to her.   The movie viewer sees all of these images of human beauty is led to contemplate beauty as something real, tangible, “objective.”  The snowfall in Los Angeles is unbelievable and yet there it is happening.

Wright believes that there is philosophical weakness for Christian apology in the idea that “Beauty points away from the present world to a different one altogether.”    Yet this is exactly what beauty, truth and love all do so well.  They help us to aspire to something greater than this world, in which we recognize that sin has deformed the divine goodness in all of them.

“Beauty will save the world,”  wrote the Russian Orthodox writer Fyodor Dostoyevesky .  For when we recognize beauty, when we recognize that there is something good and essential to being human which is not based in human logic or rationalism, we free ourselves from the limits of reason and open ourselves to the possibility of the spiritual and the divine.  Sometimes believers are way too dependent on ideas of justice and human reason in their ideas of what Christianity means.  Such a focus limits the means and methods of the God who created the universe by speaking poetically and by incarnating His Word.

Berdyaev writes, ‘the final end of being must be thought of as beauty and not as goodness,’ not fulfillment of law but the synergy of divine and human creative freedom for the sake of the eternal kingdom of Love.  Indeed, good that is defined as the opposite of evil contradicts beauty in the same way that the sinful and enslaving structures of objectification contradict the kingdom of God. …  Good that functions as the opposite of evil is only a means, a path at best, to the kingdom of God, whereas ‘beauty lies beyond the knowledge of good and evil’ and all of the division and disharmony of sin.  The perfect perichoresis of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is Beauty.  The communion of the saints in the kingdom of Heaven is Beauty.    …  The beauty of the kingdom of God is not an object but the quality of transfigured relationships reached through and by the synergy of human and divine energies. … The beauty of the kingdom of God is holiness.  Holiness is a communion of love and not merely a possession of the independent ego.”  (Vigen Guroian, “Nicholas Berdyaev” in THE TEACHINGS OF MODERN CHRISTIANITY)

Truth and goodness are not mere opposites of transgressing the Law of God.  Sin is not mere violating the Law which requires a juridical punishment in order to restore cosmic justice.  Sin distorts the beauty with which God imbued creation and all human beings.  Righteousness when equated only with justice loses the full sense of the power of salvation as holiness which transfigures and transforms that which has been deformed by sin, restoring the inner beauty, the image and likeness of God in all humans.

Madison: In Favor of the Separtion of Church & State

It has been some little while since I wrote about my readings in the WRITINGS of American Founding Father and President, James Madison.    I began reading him because some historians think him to be the most influential founding father in defining the relationship between government and religion in America.  There are many who engage in an argument as to whether the founding fathers thought of the United States as a Christian nation or whether they advocated a total separation of church and state.  Madison embraced both ideas.  He did consider himself a Christian and considered Christianity to be the superior form of religion.  He also thought it best for Christians to live in a country where the state has declared itself neutral regarding any religion as then the membership is completely there by free choice and not be coercion.

Madison wrote in 1819 that in his opinion the evidence he could see based upon the American effort to create “the total separation of the Church from the State” was that more people were attending church than ever, the morality of the clergy had improved and devotion to God had increased.  Not only did Christianity not perish by not being supported by the government, but in Madison’s opinion it was much stronger for it.  The clergy were doing just fine, and the state had suffered no loss but benefitted as well from this separation. 

Madison turns a phrase now and again to emphasize his belief in the separation between religion and government and warns states against “giving to Caesar what belongs to God, or joining together what God has put asunder.”    Thus he took what Jesus said in Matthew 19:6 regarding the indissolubility of marriage and reversing the saying made the separation of Church and state to have been declared by God.   In another instance of turning a phrase and rejecting any sense of the divine right of Kings, Madison proclaims the “divine right of conscience.” 

Madison opposed putting the name of Jesus Christ into any constitutional document as that would profane His holy name by making it a legislative discussion.  Besides he points out, Jesus himself declared His kingdom is not of this world; therefore Madison wanted no one to confuse the two.

Madison was likewise against the appointment of Chaplains for the congress and senate as well as in the military.   His stated fear is always that the religious majority will impose their practices on the minority.  Madison notes that Roman Catholics, which in his time represented a tiny minority in America, should not be forced against the stated practices of the Roman Church to participate in the religious prayers and practices of the predominant religious groups in America.    Church members should be free to practice their conscience and creed and not have to do, say or pray what the majority religions are demanding of their members.   Religious truth is not established by the numbers of its adherents.  The individual’s right to follow his own conscience is more important than the will of the majority.  In the end he believed military chaplains always serve the temporal interests of the powers that be and of the chaplains themselves rather than the spiritual interest of the flock.  He felt that requiring soldiers to participate in religion was the best way to kill their interest in religion.

He also opposed religious proclamations (declaring thanksgiving or fasts) from the office of the president.  He notes George Washington did declare thanksgiving and fasts and generically referred to God.  John Adams actually embraced Christian prayer in his role as president, while both Thomas Jefferson and himself had refused to make religious declarations as president.  While today Americans are accustomed to hearing “one nation under God,”  Madison was opposed to “The idea also of a union of all to form one nation under one Govt in acts of devotion to the God of all…” 

Madison remained convinced that one result of the Fall of humankind was that the merging of religion and government always led to abuses of power and the trampling on the conscience of individuals.  He felt that religion’s temptation was to rely on government for its support rather than on the membership to actively support and live the religion.  He felt the temptation for Government was to claim divine support for its temporal plans and thus again to crush the conscience of individuals.