From Truth, to Goodness, to Beauty

I used to think we were headed for a new Dark Age. Now, I believe we may already be there.

There is an upside, however, because in the darkness, we can better recognize the light and walk toward it.

But only if we are willing to look up from the blue screen glowing in front of us and encourage others to join us without basking in the electronic glow.

I preach to myself as well because I’m finding it more difficult to sink into a longer text and stay there until the end.

But the longer text of a classic is always worth the work.

We should be embarrassed to admit that it took so many years to realize that too many–one is too many–college students have never read an entire book. At least not since the Little Golden Book days of their toddlerhood.

And who says good books are only for the college-bound?

The Atlantic, not a conservative resource from classical Christian education, has realized this loss in our education system. Even students at our elite universities, far too many of them, have never read a book.

For the last quarter century at least, educational testing has marked students’ ability to navigate a passage, so education systems locked into teaching young ones how to do just that.

No more Bronte, Hugo, Dostoevsky, and Lee in their entirety.

No more requiring a student to follow an epic journey from beginning to end.

We have added fuel to the fire that limits our collective ability to think well. To think with clarity and critical analysis.

We have lost the personal discipline it takes to plod through Hugo’s fifty pages of Napolean’s failure at Waterloo to get to the crisis Jean Valjean must face to save Marius in Les Miserables. We’ve lost the discipline to even get to those fifty pages.

It takes discipline to get to the beauty of a great book. Therein lies the truth any great author has sweat blood to tell us: that we are more than body and mind. We are souls capable of courage, capable of seeing beauty, capable of telling truth through goodness and beauty.

Great writers create beauty to show goodness and truth. In losing our discipline to read long texts, we have lost so much more because from truth, goodness, and beauty come meaning and purpose in our lives.

Few people today see meaning and purpose in their lives. Fewer than half.

The answer may be found in the nearest library or bookstore. Wise sages tell us how to pursue the answer.

“Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.” Stratford Caldecott

“If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”  C.S. Lewis

If you don’t have a classic book on the shelf and didn’t get one last Christmas, buy one for yourself, a classic that contains truth about humanity, truth about who we are, beings capable of being courageous on behalf of goodness.

Christmas is coming. This year, buy good books as gifts. Embrace goodness in truth’s defense and promote the beautiful in the culture around us.

I used to pay my two youngest sons to read good books. (I hadn’t thought of the idea with the older three.) That was some of the best spent cash I ever spent.

Shakespeare, Tolkien, Lewis.

People grow stronger character from such books.

And we grow better from having seen tough tasks through to the end–the quest of the characters and our own in the completion of a thing of beauty.

(Photo Credit: my personal album, Rostrevor, Northern Ireland, 2024)