What Rough Beast?

 

A random comment seen on Twitter, in response to a local school banning Mother’s Day: “woke destroys everything good.”

A simple statement, but truth is usually simple. I think it is deeply true.

Begin with the premise, known and accepted from ancient times, that the purpose of human life is to seek the good, the true, and the beautiful. This is so regardless of your particular religion, regardless even of whether you are a monotheist, a secularist, or a pagan. The absolute value of these three things is intrinsic, self-evident and beyond argument. You simply cannot coherently say that good is not good, or truth is not true. The response to beauty is immediate, unmediated, not a matter for judgment or doubt. The monotheisms merely posit a personal God as the ultimate source and essence of all three.

Now we see a contrary spirit, roaming the landscape as if to devour, a rough beast; which we currently call “woke.” It targets these three, goodness, truth, and beauty, as if a guided missile. 

Begin with motherhood; for the present epidemic seems to have begun here. It is an emblem of the good. In a healthy culture, motherhood is inviolate. Remember “motherhood and apple pie?” This is why the cow is sacred in India: as a symbol of motherhood. Individual mothers fall short, but motherhood itself is an image of selfless love, of wanting the best for the other; and this is the essence of the Good. Perhaps even more, the child’s reverence for the mother or father is an image of the proper loving attitude towards the divine. Which is why we pray the “Our Father.” 

And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

For comparison, it is because they do not nurture their young that serpents and reptiles have become, everywhere, a symbol of moral evil.

Sometime in the early 1960s, the culture turned against motherhood and children. Witness feminism. The premise of feminism is that motherhood is bad; all else follows from this. And this was reinforced, suddenly, with a concern over “overpopulation.” Having children was bad. Indeed, they should be actively done away with. And then we have abortion. Now actually glorified as a kind of sacrament. We are now moving on to genital mutilation of children to ensure that the next generation is infertile.

Homosexuality became admirable, largely or entirely because it does not lead to motherhood and children. 

Parallel is the attack on “conventional morality,” i.e., morality as such, and the common constructivist claim of moral relativism. Churches are vandalized; priests and ministers jailed; crosses replaced by snowflakes. We are now “spiritual, but not religious.” Why the difference? Religion implies a commitment to moral conduct.

The term “woke” is itself an attack on truth. It means here the opposite of its literal meaning. The “woke” become like NPCs. If they think for themselves, if they diverge even slightly from the “narrative”—and this term is itself a denial of truth—they are no longer “woke.” They are like sleepwalkers, in sum. The concept of a “zombie apocalypse” has so captured the popular imagination in recent decades because it is exactly what we are experiencing, day to day.

“Political correctness,” a term that emerged in the 1970s in its current sense, as a shorthand for adherence to “woke” doctrine, is a systematic reversal of the meaning of words, an assault on truth and truth-telling. A spade must not be called a spade. “Exceptional children” are now not the most intelligent or talented, but the least. “Gender-affirming care” destroys one’s gender. “Pro-choice” strips the child, the father, the grandparents of all choice. “Reproductive rights” deny men’s reproductive rights. “Equity” means inequality. “Social justice” means systemic social injustice. “Anti-racism” means racism. “Antifascism” means fascism. “Community” means alienation from your neighbours in favour of strangers who share some political interest. “Health care” means killing, of unborn children or, more recently and increasingly, the old, the poor, the despondent.

The “deplatforming,” the “unfriending,” the censoring, the cancelling, and the “hate laws,” are also an assault on truth, because it is only through free discussion that truth can be sought or known. Now everyone must guard their speech, and anyone who seems to say what they actually believe is, for that reason, and apparently no other, condemned, perhaps fired. Witness Tucker Carlson. Witness Joe Rogan. Witness Trump Derangement Syndrome.

As for the assault on beauty: feminism made a virtue out of making oneself appear ugly. The current issue of “fat shaming” is in this mold: one is now obliged to accept a woman’s declaration that she is beautiful, regardless of one’s own senses. But then, just as often, if you say she is beautiful, you are harassing her. And this is surely at least  a part of the current celebration of crossdressing: the bottom line is that Dylan Mulvaney and other “drag queens” are grotesque, a parody of feminine beauty. 

As for the beauty of art, that has been under attack since perhaps R. Mutt in 1917. Witness more recently the pulling down of statues, of public art, the burning down of beautiful churches, the assaults on paintings in the galleries of Europe.

Many attribute it all to George Soros or to Klaus Schweib and the WEF. But this is not an adequate explanation. Even if they plan evil, these people would not have the power to do so much. They are themselves zombies. The real culprit has to be a powerful spirit with a capability for mind control, for possession, fascination, or ecstasy; these are the characteristics of the pagan gods, the daemons, the obsessions. And a spirit bent systematically on evil and the destruction of man. Perhaps you can, as the Rolling Stones once sang, guess his name. There is a spirit of destruction in the universe, who hates God and mankind.

The term “woke” is a funny little tipoff here. It seems borrowed from the Gnostics, the Satanic heresy that has dogged the monotheisms throughout the centuries. Gnostics imagine themselves superior to the general run of mankind, because they are “awake,” possessing secret knowledge. This puts them above concerns like morality or truth that delude the common rabble. They can create their own morality, invent their own truths. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment was the type. Hitler was apparently an acolyte. Self-styled “elites,” along with those who have been pampered growing up, are particularly vulnerable to such thinking.

Where does this all lead? We must have faith. God is in control, and evil is self-limiting. It will go so far, and then it will collapse.

Justifying God's Ways to Seiko

 

Leibniz

A letter to Seiko, who, at 45, has lived his entire life with anxiety and depression, and who does not believe in God:

You may not be good at evaluating your own parents’ character. There is an English saying, “It’s a wise child who knows his own father.” It is extremely difficult to be objective about your parents. It takes a lot of quiet meditation over your childhood memories, ideally without having to deal with your parents regularly at the same time.

Although I identified my father as profoundly selfish at a fairly early age, I did not realize my mother was as well until after her death. There is usually a dominant and a submissive narcissist. The submissive narcissist is likely to present themselves as a victim.

You ask if I have ever confronted my parents. Never really my mother, since I did not recognize her narcissism until after her death. My father, yes. 

It is usually advised that you do not confront the narcissist. They will not change―all you can do is get away. I do not agree. I have heard, at least, of narcissists reforming once confronted. 

The problem, I think, is that it does not work to confront them with being a narcissist. The psychological approach is designed to allow them to deny responsibility. It is most likely to roll off them like water off a duck’s anterior. They may even happily accept the label. After all, it makes them special, and then if you criticize them for anything, you are being cruel to the disabled. They can play the victim.

I gather you have confronted your parents with something, and they have apologized and even offered compensation. This is surprising. This does not sound like narcissists. Narcissists cannot admit moral fault. But here’s what might be happening. By declaring yourself mentally ill, you usefully discredit your testimony as a witness. I suspect this is why the concept of “mental illness” exists. It allows the victim to relatively freely express himself, and the parents and society to freely ignore them. Yes, they might seem to accept your criticism, but in their own minds they they are just humouring poor crazy Seiko.

It is a survival mechanism. But it traps you.

I believe the trick to genuinely calling out the narcissist is, first, to clearly establish the moral high ground. You must confront your conscience and have no doubts that you are in the right. Then you must call them out in expressly moral terms. Do not talk psychology, but about right and wrong.

What happens then? I have testimony that some narcissists will reform. But more likely, they will die. The problem is that they have made their self the centre of their universe. Admitting their self has been wrong feels like death to them, death of the entire universe.

For both you and the narcissist, this is a matter of life and death. I am not speaking metaphorically.

As for escaping your parents financially, I know very well how hard this is, with them probably in hot pursuit, and all while suffering from extreme depression and anxiety.

In earlier days, it was easier—when monasteries were a live option. Perhaps Buddhist monasteries still are, in Japan, but Christian monasteries now expressly refuse refuge to anyone suffering from mental illness. 

And then they wonder why nobody becomes a monk or nun anymore.

As to the moral universe, you write, “when we observe the world as is, then one must admit that one can't observe justice or fairness or anything that kind of stuff.”

This is not really the issue. Whether the universe, or the people around us, are moral, has no bearing on whether we have a duty to be moral. This is the “is-ought” fallacy.

But I would also argue that the universe as a whole is moral.

Imagine you are God, and you design the universe so that only good and pleasant things ever happen. Nobody is ever tempted to do anything wrong; or those who do wrong are quickly and obviously punished, and those who do right are quickly and obviously rewarded.

This would actually be a world in which no good could exist. 

For anyone doing “right” would simply be acting out of self-interest. No morality is involved.

The world in which good is maximized is one in which good and evil are not obviously rewarded, but eventually are—behind a veil, where we cannot witness it. For example, in an afterlife.

Still, God would probably want to make sure that “the arc of the moral universe is long,” as Martin Luther King put it, “but bends toward justice.” I think this is so, shown both by logic and the evidence of history. For example, lying is effective for evil people only because and so long as enough people tell the truth that we tend to take everyone’s claims at face value. If a majority of people start lying, lying no longer becomes possible or useful. Similarly, if a majority of people start stealing, stealing things is no longer meaningful, since the thief himself would never have secure possession. And so on, for every sin. The universe seems to be structured so that good, in the end, must dominate and must win.

Why couldn’t God have just made us all passive animals, with full bellies and without tough moral choices?

Think about it. Aside from the moral good being of self-evident value, would you really want that life? For a simple comparison, what fun is it to play a game or sport, if it is always predetermined that you win and get a prize. And, if you play a sport, or a game, isn’t the enjoyment in large part because of the effort expended, and the difficulties met and overcome?

The good will win out in the end.

An Updated List

... of the Seven Deadly Sins:

Cultural Relativism

Dante's Inferno

I not sure anything could be more sinister than the current idea that morality is culturally relative. But that seems to have become a dominant position. Even my friend Cyrus has bought it—and Cyrus is a very intelligent guy.

If morality is culturally relative, decided by some consensus within a culture to suit its own purposes, we have no business objecting to Hitler and the Nazis. The Nuremberg Trials were not legitimate. It was accepted within that society to kill all Jews. If we object, we are simply being cultural imperialists and showing our intolerance.

Not, of course, that there is anything necessarily wrong with intolerance or imperialism, right? After all, they too might be sanctioned by our culture...

So too with slavery, or child sacrifice, or torture, or suttee, and so forth.

There are other problems with the premise. Suppose you live in one of the anti-slavery counties in the antebellum US South. So, if you hold a slave, you are immoral locally, moral at the state level, and immoral at the federal level? The same act at the same time is both moral and immoral.

Most people, it seems, avoid moral choices by going along with what everyone around them is doing, and doing the same. This is an attempt to justify that attitude. But it is unjustifiable. It is lynch mob morality. It is the attitude that makes mobs in general so dangerous: if everyone else is smashing windows, tonight, I can smash windows.

It would make you a willing executioner in Hitler’s Germany.

It would make Oskar Schindler a moral reprobate.

Or Socrates. Or Qu Yuan. Or Jesus Christ.

Is just going along and never making individual moral choices immoral? Dante thought so. He put all such people in the first circle of Hell.

God thinks so too, according to the New Testament: “I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of my mouth.” (Revelations 3:16).

Literally, this says it is better to be deliberately evil than to just go along—at least you are acknowledging morality. That means there is some hope for you. None so guilty as the “innocent bystander.”

Worse than doing evil is denying the existence of evil.

Practical or Transcendent Morality

Relics of the Rwandan genocide.

My good buddy Cyrus rejects my contention that there are transcendent values: most famously, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

In conversation last night he insisted that morality could be derived entirely from the pragmatic needs of society. “Do unto others” simply ends up being in our mutual interest. So it is all empirical.

I disagree. It might be entirely to a society’s—that is, a group’s—benefit to allow or encourage murder of some distinct target group. Then the murderers, after all, might get all their stuff. This works fine so long as the designated group is relatively powerless, and distinct enough that no members of the dominant group fear the same force being turned on them in future.

Whenever some society has considered itself free from traditional moral constraints, this is exactly what has happened, and happened soon: mass murder of some vulnerable and distinct “other” group. The Jews or the disabled in Nazi Germany, the kulaks or Ukrainians in Soviet Russia, the unborn today.

Murder is the most dramatic example, but by the same principle, a society that does not accept transcendent values can equally justify any other sort of wrong against the vulnerable group: lying, theft, enslavement, and so forth.

So the practical needs of society cannot produce morality.

The Meaning of Life

Winged Victory of Samothrace.

Monty Python's final movie was titled “The Meaning of Life.” The gist of it was that nobody knows what it is; we're all wandering around clueless. Douglas Adams implied the same by declaring randomly that the meaning of life was 42.

This is actually quite a new problem. Everyone used to know. It popped up more or less postwar, with dadaism, then postwar again with existentialism. Their blank black banner is now carried by postmodernism.

Until perhaps the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, everyone knew what life was about. And we really still all do in our hearts; for it is graven there. We were not made without instructions. As the ancient philosophers noted often enough, life is the quest for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. These are the things with intrinsic value, and which bestow value and meaning on all else.

Note this does not even require a belief in God; this much is self-evident to polytheists as much as Christians. Plato and Aristotle knew it; it's in the Bhagavad Gita.

Postmodernists and their tribe insist, counter to this, that there is no Truth, no Good, and no Beauty. This is just not a philosophically tenable position.

Truth: Two plus two equals four; it does not equal seven. There's truth. Today is Monday, and not Friday. There's truth. The distinction is not difficult to see; no sane person can miss it. A commitment to Truth requires you to go where reason and the available evidence lead; rather than just believing what you want to believe, what others tell you to believe, whatever first comes to mind, or what seems in your self-interest to believe.

It is a blood-red herring to object, as postmodernists will, that you cannot be certain that you have the absolute truth. So what? No glass is ever entirely full either. There is still a critical difference between full and empty. I don't have all the money in the world. That does not mean I have no money.

And, of course, the simple statement “there is no truth” self-contradicts. It cannot, by its own terms, be true.

The Good: That morality is not relative is demonstrated planly enough by the fact that evey major religion and moral system bases itself explicitly on the same maxim: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It can be and is formulated in different ways as well, but it appears almost word for word in this same way everywhere. There is no disagreement or ambiguity here; nothing relative. Kant too found this the one irrefutable imperative of human existence: do unto others. Treat others as an end, not a means. If how this is worked out in detail can vary, so can how we build a bridge; but our calculations are all still based on the same law of gravity. Accordingly, we can plainly say there are better and worse ways to build a bridge. We can judge moral codes as more or less strict; not as randomly different.

The Beautiful: No, beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. For example, show pictures of women of various races to men of various races; contrary to what is sometimes claimed, their evaluation of who is beautiful is consistent across all cultural lines. There is, objectively, such a thing as good taste and bad taste. It makes no differencce that some people have consistently bad taste; some people also do poorly at math. Statues like the Winged Victory of Samothrace can still be easily recognized as sublimely beautiful, two thousand five hundred years later and several thousands of miles away.

The question here is why so many people so often deny what is about as self-evident as anything in existence.

The Gospel of John tells why:

This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.

Once you turn away from the Good, generally in favour of self-interest and for animal pleasures, you will soon deny that any true good exists. Because it stands in condemnation of you. And, as philosophers have pointed out, each of the three transcendentals implies the other: without Good, there can be no Truth, without Truth, no Beauty, and without Beauty, no Good.

Therefore, once you turn decisively from the Good, you develop a vested interest in denying Good, Truth, and Beauty, all three, altogether. If you stumble on a truth or a good deed or some beautiful thing, you will want to deny it, conceal it from others, or, ideally, destroy it.

This naturally divides mankind into two opposing tribes; which Jesus called the sheep and the goats. The sheep keep building; the goats keep trying to tear down. Sheep may stray, through temptation or through folly, but their resolve is to keep on the path to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Goats do not acknowledge this call. They begin by merely doing as they please in the moment. But over time they come to try also to distract the sheep away from the goal. They will actually seek and promote the false, the bad, and the ugly for their own sake, and to crush the good. Evil is an addiction.

It serves a certain inevitable justice then if, as Jesus says, the sheep at worst, if lost, suffer a time in purgatory, while the goats descend to hell forever. It has been their choice: they rejected that road, knowing where it led. If you refuse the path to Truth and Good and Beauty, you will not arrive at Truth and Good and Beauty, will you?

Understanding this, one can see, by the popularity of postmodernist views, that our Western culture is currently in great peril. It is urging us on to perdition. It obliges us, for example, to expressly claim to believe things that are untrue; such as that people can simply decide for themselves what sex they are. It often now promotes art that is deliberately ugly. It requires us not only to tolerate abortion, but to pay for it through our taxes or health premiums. It attacks any established moral system, such as Catholicism or Confucianism. These are definite attempts to prevent others from pursuing the Good, the True, or the Beautiful.

This was claimed as well of cultures in the Old Testament: the Canaanite, the cities of the plain, the Philistine. It did not end well; for the sake of all concerned, such cultures had to be wiped out. As Carthage or Nazi Germany had to be wiped out.

This begins to sound very gloomy. Is Western civilization doomed?

I trust not. I see no obvious better alternative. If the West has gone barking mad, I have lived in China, in South Korea, and in the Arabian Gulf, and found those cultures, quite different one from the other, to be even madder, even further estranged from the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

Perhaps the Trump phenomenon, for all its wartiness, is the first glimmer of a new Great Awakening in the US, that can reverse this downward spiral. Perhaps too the countries of the old European East Bloc carry the flame of truth. Living in the Philippines, I find the average Filipino strikingly sane in contrast to the typical Canadian: perhaps the newer Christian and Westernizing cultures of Africa and Asia will lead a revival.

The Meaning of Life: Not 42

Not all religions are equal. Why would they be? How could they be? All religions may and must include all that is needful, but if they are different, they cannot be equal. I have studied all the major world religions, and, while I love them all, I frankly do have favourites.

Traditionally in Western thought, starting with Plato, with traces back to Parmenides, there are three transcendentals: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. These are the three qualities that abide in all things, and to the degree that they subsist in something, give a thing its value. In other words, they are the measures of all value. Put another way, they are the proper goals or objectives of human life.

Is this an arbitrary list? I cannot feel so. It seems to me that the proposition is self-evident once proposed. One cannot seem to superimpose some other, external standard by which goodness or truth can be measured and determined to have or not have value. Other, that is, than in terms of one of the other transcendentals. And so as well with beauty. These seem to be genuine a prioris. There may be others, and others have been proposed, but at a minimum, these three.

Now, given that these three are what they appear to be, the goals of existence, a religion can be evaluated on the basis of how well it recognizes and accommodates all three in its concept of God or the sacred, and of righteous human life.

On this score, I think Catholic Christianity has to ge the highest score, objectively. It is the one, to my eye, that most fully emphasizes all three aspects of life and of the divine: the faith, the morals and the ceremonials and sacramentals. I felt this in a deep, intuitive way before I thought to apply the doctrine of the universals, but the doctrine of the universals confirms it.

Take Islam first, as a comparison, since it is so much in the news. I find it bereft of a proper appreciation for Beauty. It is deeply suspicious of the arts: of painting, music, dance. Walk into a mosque, and there is very little there but bare walls. To me, this makes it feel barren and lifeless. 

Radha, image of the devotee, with Krishna.

Now take Buddhism or Hinduism. They seem to avoid the issue of the Good. They lack a strong moral dimension. Buddhist seems stronger on the Truth, Hinduism on Beauty, but both are relatively lacking in moral emphasis. To me, this makes them feel ultimately unserious, ephemeral. For East Asian culture in general, this lack is made up for by Confucianism, which emphasizes the Good without touching much on the True or the Beautiful. A relative lack of emphasis on Beauty in Buddhism is made up for in East Asia by Taoism. Bundled together, they work well. On the other hand, transporting Buddhism to the West without the other two does not work out well.

Judaism seems to me pretty solid. In theory, it should resemble Calvinism or Islam in discounting Beauty, since it shares their iconoclasm. But this does not seem to be the case, at all. Within Judaism, this seems to remain a prohibition against images of God, not against the arts. Which is, indeed, a separate and unrelated position. Judaism has a rich tradition of sacred storytelling. To the extent that a minority culture can, it also has a rich tradition of sacred music, sacred dance, and so forth. The only problem with Judaism in this regard, perhaps, is that it is ethnically and culturally based, and not easily available to us non-Jews.

Calvinism, within Christianity, seems to me to sadly lack both the Good and the Beautiful. No art, anything that smacks of art is of the devil; and no free will, so no moral issues. It seems to me only marginally religious. The Episcopalians, with their doctrinal looseness, seem to me weak on the Truth issue; it seems as though to them Truth does not matter, as long as you have Beauty. In Canada, the United Church as it now exists is similar, but without the Beauty. Good is all that matters. And so forth for other denominations.

To be fair, I can think of one area in which I find Catholic Christianity relatively lacking, and one or two other traditions stronger: humour. There is, within Christianity, a sense of scandal at laughter in a religious context. It feels blasphemous. I think this is wrong; Christianity is uptight here. It deprive God of some of his true personhood. Buddhism, by comparison, is full of jokes. Judaism enjoys a good knock-down argument with God, which seems to me healthy. Islam has the comic figure of Nasruddin. Hinduism has its “theology of play.”

Perhaps humour counts as a fourth transcendental: the Good, the True, the Beautiful, and the Funny.

And I feel there is a fifth transcendental, on which Christianity excels: Love. Or perhaps love is better defined as the proper response to the transcendentals, that of absolute attraction, of seeking them with your whole heart and your whole mind, to the neglect, if necessary, of everything else. I think it is fair to say that love is an important element in all religions: in Buddhism, in the doctrine of the Bodhisattva, in the figure of Guan Yin. In Hinduism, in the figure of Krishna, in the doctrine of bhakti yoga. In Islam, in Sufism and the Sufi poets. In Judaism, in the concept of the Shekhinah; you see it in Song of Songs.

But you can't beat the Christian formulation: God is Love.

The Meaning of Life

We are born naked and bawling.

Why are we here?

What’s the point?

Where’s the manual?

It’s to achieve “success,” right? You want to be a “success in life.”

Okay, so what is success?

“Success: noun. The accomplishment of an aim or purpose.”

Wait a minute. That’s circular. So if I decide my only aim is to keep my belly button clean, I have more or less guaranteed myself a great life?

Welcome to Buddhism 101.

Yet this seems too simple. This seems, in the end, utterly pointless.

Some—most—define success more specifically, as acquiring significant wealth, or social status. But doesn’t that, too, seem ultimately pointless? Wealth beyond a certain point is just a symbol, because what it can do to change your life is limited. And, whatever it can do to change your life, studies show that it does not, really does not, bring happiness.

It tends to cost friends. Either they envy you, or they want money from you. You never know if they really care for you, or just want the money.

What does it do that makes it worth a life?

Striving for social status seems even worse: it means living your life in someone else’s eyes. It is like being a ghost. Those who achieve fame, supposedly the pinnacle of this, tell us it is not an enjoyable thing. You are no longer your own.

But wait. Isn’t the answer implicit here? We speak of money or fame not bringing happiness. Isn’t the real goal, then, the pursuit of happiness?

No.

Looks good for a moment, but no. Isn’t that, too, ultimately meaningless? Not that there is no clear formula for achieving it. Not that one cannot even experience happiness, it seems, except in contrast with sadness, making a quest for happiness seem like chasing one’s tail. That is all true; but more importantly, happiness itself seems trivial and selfish. Okay, so you are happy, with lots of hot sex and a Marguerita balanced rakishly on your gut, for seventy or eighty years; then you die. Was that life meaningful? And is it right, is it worthy of human dignity, to even be happy so long as you know a lot of people in the world are suffering?

Pigs are happy like that, perhaps, but not people.

So what’s the point? Is it all vanity?

It was actually all worked out by the ancient Greek philosophers: by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. There are certain things that are indisputable, self-evident values in themselves, of absolute consequence. These, therefore, are the things we are here to seek. These are the good (the moral right), the true, and the beautiful. Wasting time pursuing anything else, beyond necessity, is losing the game. Every thing else is a cul de sac.

If our culture and civilization is currently in a morass, it is because we have lost this direction.

Not incidentally, the perfection of the good, the true, and the beautiful is God. As God is by definition a perfect and supreme being, he must be perfectly good, perfectly true, and perfectly beautiful. Moreover, each instance of truth, goodness, or beauty is a glimpse of His being. “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light”: I am the good, the true, the beautiful.

And so, put another way, our ultimate goal in life is to find and become closer to God. To find and follow the way, the good; to seek and say the truth, the real; to seek and to make beauty.

Welcome to the human race. Now at least you know the rules.

There is a fourth element: the motive power. The seeking. What is the natural vigour that impels us to these values? That fourth element, as fundamental then as the others, is love. One must love the good, absolutely. One must love the truth, absolutely. One must love beauty, absolutely. One must worship no false gods before them.

Hence the first commandment: to love God with your whole heart, your whole soul, and your whole mind. Mind for the truth, heart for the good, soul for beauty.

If you cannot do that, if you do not do that, you cannot love anyone other than God either. Nobody who does not love the truth can really love another human. I am not sure why this is so; but I know it is so. Nor can anyone who does not love good, or does not love beauty, love another human. You might want to own them, or have sex with them, or get something from them, but you do not love them.

Anyone who loves the good, the true, and the beautiful, loves God. He or she is a Christian, whether they have ever heard the name “Jesus” or not. The name is not important; it is not even his real name. The man would not have responded to the name “Jesus” if hailed on the streets of Jerusalem. It is the cosmic Jesus, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Light, to which we must turn for salvation.

Anyone who does not love with full heart the good, the true, and the beautiful does not love God or Jesus, and is not a Christian, whatever words they use. And does not love any man, whatever words they use. And has failed in the race.