This is blog post number two (here is #1) from the book Cultural Apologetics by Paul Gould. This sentence caused me to sit up and wonder:
The first step toward reenchantment is to reawaken within ourselves and others the deeper desires of the heart for truth, goodness, and beauty, which in turn will arouse the heart’s deepest desire—a desire and love for God.
I will explain why this struck me, but first I need to explain the word “reenchantment.” The first part of the book deals with the disenchantment of the modern secular world. This world, it doesn’t surprise us, is de-spiritualized. It is portrayed as merely material, and if matter is all there is, then matter is all there is. There can be no such things as transcendent concepts of, for example, truth, goodness, and beauty. In other words, those concepts don’t actually exist. In a purely material universe they can only be subjective projections of human thoughts or feelings because matter can’t be true, or good, or beautiful. It can only be matter, stuff, atoms in motion. Truth, goodness, and beauty don’t exist “out there,” objectively in nature, they exist only in our minds. There is no way to refute this simple fact if materialism is the nature of things.
C.S. Lewis dealt with the same concept in The Abolition of Man. What I refer to as “the triumph of the subjective” was well under way in the West by the 1940s when he wrote. He begins his argument with a quote from a high school textbook. To protect the guilty, he gives pseudonyms to the two authors:
In their second chapter Gaius and Titius quote the well‑known story of Coleridge at the waterfall. You remember that there were two tourists present: that one called it ‘sublime’ and the other ‘pretty’: and that Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgment and rejected the second with disgust. Gaius and Titius comment as follows: ‘When the man said That is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall. Actually . . . he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word “Sublime,” or shortly, I have sublime feelings.’ Here are a good many deep questions settled in a pretty summary fashion. But the authors are not yet finished. They add: ‘This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.’
Lewis points out the importance of the word “only” in the last sentence. There is nothing to be said about whether the waterfall is actually sublime or not because sublimity doesn’t exist in something, but only in our feelings of it. From that point, disenchantment is inevitable. Things are what we think they are, nothing more, nothing less.
Fortunately, that is not true. Truth, goodness, and beauty exist because God exists. When we affirm these realities we affirm God, and thus as we point people to them we point people to God because their realities inexorably reveal God. The Apostle Paul tells us why this is in Romans 1,
20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
If this is true, and a man named Jesus of Nazareth came back from the dead to prove it, then not a single human being can deny that truth, goodness, and beauty are manifestations of God’s existence. Whenever we affirm, argue for, or prove that these ideas exist objectively in reality, in the nature of things, we are at the same times inevitably pointing them to the living God whether they acknowledge it or not. They can only resist that conclusion by doing what Paul says in that same chapter, suppressing “the truth by their wickedness.” The problem rebellious sinners have, however, is that this suppressing is like trying to hold the proverbial beach ball under water; the damn thing just keeps popping up despite all your efforts to keep it down. Truth is like that, as are goodness and beauty.
One reason, among many, I’m an enthusiastic promoter of classical education is that they teach that objective truth, goodness, and beauty exist, and are not “only saying something about our own feelings.” This is true even of classical public charter schools where God is not a distinct object of study. Culturally this is significant because government run schools in effect teach “the triumph of the subjective.” This worldview has infected public schools and most private for a hundred years, and is one of the reasons our society is as sick as it is. If we reenchant our youth with the reality of truth, goodness, and beauty, there is hope not only for our culture, but for their souls.
Recent Comments