Kenneth R. Samples suggests human beings ask What is real? What is right? What is lovely? because we long for at least three things: truth, goodness, and beauty.
Communication tower in Vatican garden
It can be argued that the pursuit for truth, goodness, and beauty is visible behind the surface of our creative activity even in the fields of engineering and economics.
Prominent philosophers through the centuries have called these three cosmic values transcendentals. A transcendental refers to something that exists beyond the time-space-matter world. It is a universal reality that extends beyond our everyday sensory experiences and is thus considered nonphysical, immaterial, conceptual, or even spiritual. In philosophy, the transcendental relates to and seeks to describe the nature of reality or being. Therefore, one may think of these values as timeless universals and attributes of being.1
The “Enlightenment” rational philosophy tended to reduce the “real” to what we could perceive with our senses. The phenomena of resonance is well known by mathematicians, engineers, and musicians. It can be modelled with differential equations, observed in engineering systems, and perceived by human senses. The truth of understanding numerical values tending to infinity, electromagnetic signals pulled from the ether, and the beauty of notes and tones that reach to our spirit may point to a connection to cosmic values that have motivated humans to create for the good of others.
Richard Rohr finds truth, goodness, and beauty as essential. Any other “handler” of our experience, including the rational mind or even mere intellectual theology, eventually distorts and destroys the beauty and healing power of the Big Truth.
The second principle is that truth is on some level always beautiful—and healing—to those who honestly want truth. Big Truth cannot be angry, antagonistic, or forced on anyone, or it will inherently distort the message (as the common belief in a punitive God has done for centuries). The good, the true, and the beautiful are always their own best argument for themselves, by themselves, and in themselves. Such beauty, or inner coherence, is a deep inner knowing that both evokes the soul and even pulls the soul into All Oneness. Incarnation is beauty, and beauty always needs to be incarnate, that is specific, concrete, particular. We need to experience very particular, soul-evoking goodness in order to be shaken into what many call “realization.” It is often a momentary shock where you know you have been moved to a different plane of awareness.2
A question raised on the CBC Sunday Magazine program on March 21 was can we engineer our way out of the ecological mess we've made? This possibility will depend for success on seeking truth in areas like economic equity, celebrating beauty in all the people and life in Nature, and making achievement of the common good the goal and measure of our success.
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