The True, the Good, the Beautiful part 1
This morning I sat down to write a blog discussing the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. My thought was that we discuss these concepts so much in classical education circles. We want these ideals for ourselves and for our students, but what are they? How do we find them? Where do we find them? And if and when we do, how can we capture them and pass them on to our students. While immersed in these ethereal thoughts, floating on a little pink cloud of confusion, while reveling in the very confusion itself, my palm slipped over the touchpad of my laptop in such a way that POOF!!! the whole blog disappeared from my page… and no amount of CTRL Z or alt F4 or any other key strokes would recall my words.
It is one thing to write about virtues, it is quite another to possess those self-same qualities. The truth of that hit me particularly hard as my very existence agonized over the work lost… not even that it was that insightful or brilliant, but frankly more that my very structured and (of late) somewhat harried existence had allotted precisely 40 minutes for the blog writing, after which other pressing matters were on my plate: physics lectures for next week’s classes, a professional portfolio due at work, to say nothing of piles of laundry to be folded, a kid or two to engage with, dinner to be cooked, and a Saturday evening Vespers service at church that I had PROMISED myself the luxury of going to this afternoon at 5.
The virtues …where are they to be found… if not in the mundane? Why do I struggle to catch more than glimpses of them in literature and in people more saintly than myself? What is it I need to do to even begin to grasp them… let alone pretend to teach them to my own students (at home and at the university where I teach)?
My goal this fall is to write (however feebly) a series on Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, and I will start where I probably can do the most good, historically by discussing the classical pagan virtues, what they were, how they were conceived of in literature, worship, philosophy and life, and then in another blog address how Christianity ‘altered’ those virtues, or at least how the Christian addition of humility, love, and mercy changed the way ideals were perceived. I will try to discuss both ancient and modern Christian ideals and virtues. And then I hope to follow with a final blog post or two discussing more practically (though meagerly) how to find literature and themes of virtue and how they might be incorporated into our teaching AS WELL AS (even more meagerly, though more importantly) hints and shadows of how we might pursue the virtues in our own lives and how that might reflect in our teaching.
I will end with this today (as I am well over my silly 40 minute limit 🙂 ) that what has struck me most powerfully is that we often mis-define or equivocate what we mean by the word ‘virtue’.
The ancient Romans meant ‘manliness’. Virtue comes from the word ‘vir’, which means man. So the original meaning of the word we use, virtue, is that it pertained to being like and behaving like a man, which chiefly meant operating from a position of honor and strength, as opposed to ‘womanliness’ which ostensibly operated more from a position of the weaker partner, she who is in need of protection and patronage. I won’t go into the gender issues of this conception till a later blog. Rather let me contrast this with the Victorian understanding of virtue, as best expressed through Jane Austen’s character Mary in Pride and Prejudice. Mary notes (and I am going by memory here) that ‘virtue’ in a female, once lost, is irretrievable.
The meaning of virtue in the Victorian era had changed from the Roman ‘manliness’ to exclusively refer to adherence to sexual norms, and at that, for females only.
How did the shift come about? What caused virtue to move from an issue of manly strength and honor to an issue of female sexual purity?
And with such sliding in words and their meanings… as we attempt to return to the Platonic ideals of pursuing Truth, Goodness, and Beauty … can we hope to find some answers in our quest for Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.
Finally, as I contemplate my own immature, impatience, and irrational reaction to losing the first blog I wrote, is virtue found in the mundane jam stains on the refrigerator shelves and scratches in shiny new automobile paint?
Or is it to be sought in the sublime mountain top experiences that we are occasionally graced with?
What must be the states of our minds in hopes of detecting her?
Does she flitter about, teasing us, unattainable?
Or is she clear and apparent, if only we could be still enough to perceive her?