“And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God.” Mark 10:18
The Good
Now we get to ‘the good’. Like the True, we tend to ‘know it when we see it’, and yet, the good can also be hard to recognize and quantify.
In the same way that God is the standard for truth (I am the way, the life, and the truth John 14:6), God is also the standard for goodness, as we see in the verse that introduces this section of our blog. Only God is good.
But what is goodness? The dictionary says
good·ness
1.good quality: the quality of being good
2.virtuousness: personal virtue or kindness
3.good part: the nutrition or other benefit to be derived from something
We would go with definition 1 above for goodness. It helps hardly at all because now we need to define the adjective good, if we want to pursue this line of reasoning. When something is good in the sense that we want to use the word in this blog, it is morally excellent, virtuous, righteous, or pious, in the way that we know that a truly good man would be morally excellent, virtuous, righteous, or pious.
This fits with our assertion about that only God is good, because only God is morally excellent, virtuous and righteous. (We can only speak of God being pious in the sense of the incarnation of Christ. Christ was ‘pious’, in the sense of fulfilling every religious obligation and living an exemplary life as a human being.)
So when we talk about pursuing the good in a classical education, we refer ultimately to pursuing the divine, to aspire to see, touch, and experience the divine, and hopefully in the process to have it permeate our lives, our values, and radiate out to those whose lives we touch.
But not to get too out of touch with the dishes in the sink, the laundry that needs folding, and my preparation for next week’s classes, to say nothing of my sewing repairs, and the meal at church I am in charge of next week … how do I know what is good? How do I know it in my daily dealings with those whose lives I touch? How do I know it when I work over my monthly budget or decide which requests from other people I grant and which ones I deny?
In Genesis, Joseph tells his brothers that what they did to him they meant for evil, but God brought good for it. In a like manner, St. Paul talks about overcoming evil with good.
Alright … here is my supposition. We all know what evil looks like. Or at least we have seen much evil, perhaps in our own lives, perhaps in the news. Regardless, we know it when we see it, and we know not to do it.
Literature (part in parcel with a classical education) portrays good and evil in their many facets. This happens in medieval fairy tales or folk tales where the good and the evil are typified by beautiful princesses and ugly withces. Snow White is perfect, beautiful and good. Her stepmother is jealous, and the jealousy turns her to evil deeds, whereby she attempts to kill the innocent Snow White. The handsome prince rescues Snow White with love’s first kiss. We know who is good and who is bad in those tales. The story of Snow White affirms our values about purity and love. We read those stories, not to discern good from evil, but to didactically affirm the values we already hold. We read those stories to our children to awaken in them a sense of good and bad.
Myth does have some clear good and bad associated with it, as when Atreus murdered the children of his twin brother Thyestes and then fed those children to Thyestes. But often, Myth is more complicated. The world of myth is unpredictable, and you can be a person of goodness, and still get the short end of the stick. There are more forces at play in this world, and your efforts alone cannot save you from an evil fate, necessarily. Goodness is still a virtue worth holding, but do not expect, simply because you are good and do good, that all things good will result from your constancy. The world of myth is complicated, outcomes are not guaranteed.
Take for example Hippolytus, son of Theseus. He lived his life committed to chastity and to the virgin goddess, Artemis. Aphrodite takes her revenge by having Hippolytus’ step mother fall in love with Hippolytus, and disaster ensues, in spite of Hippolytus having done nothing wrong, apart from neglecting the worship of Aphrodite.
Oedipus in his ignorance kills his father and marries his mother. In his relentless pursuit of the truth, he undoes himself completely, and wanders the earth in despair for the rest of his days.
Orestes is caught up between his duty to avenge his father and his duty not kill his mother (who killed his father).
The world is complex, life is complex, and Greek myth spins many tales delineating how blind we humans are, and how difficult it is for us to achieve any semblance of goodness in our characters because of all the conflicting demands that present themselves to us.
Note that there isn’t really a Greek god or goddess of goodness. Goodness was more compositely found in acts of either excellence or nobility, but not as a value in and of itself. If you look at the cardinal virtues, prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, and add on the three theological virtues, faith, hope,and love, you do not see goodness among them.
If you look at goodness in literature, take for example Charles Dickens’ many novels, you see that Dickens is a master at portraying evil in its many facets. His depictions of Uriah Heap (David Copperfield), the Jew Fagin (Oliver Twist) , Mr. Guppy (Bleak House), Quelp (The Curiosity Shop), Madame LeFarge (Tale of Two Cities) are almost delicious in their villainous details. In contrast, behold Dickens’ through and through good people without any flaws, which for the most part consists of mother figures, so transparent as to almost be non-existent. I am thinking here of the mother of Oliver Twist, of Lucy Manette in Tale of Two Cities, and of the love interest Agnes, who wants patiently to marry David Copperfield. The women mentioned are almost non-existent, they are soo good, which to Dickens translates to unassuming, non-demanding, endlessly patient, and self-effacing.
Much as evil is lack of goodness, we can get a handle on evil, and clearly see if for what it is. In contrast, goodness is hard to depict, though, not hard to perceive. It cannot be squeezed into a box. Goodness usually breaks the mould and bursts the bubble of fear we’re living in, as in the case of the goodness of God, that allowed Joseph to be sold into slavery, so he could later rescue his whole family from famine. Goodness emerged in ways that the brothers could never have imagined. It takes the long view, and sees the big picture. Yes, it is found in the moment, and perhaps even recognized by some… but more so, it is seen in hindsight, perceived as a whole, but even then, it is not fully comprehended by all of us.
In the story of Oedipus, it was his blindness to who he really was and what he had really done, that prevented him from seeing. His life and all that he thought he was (but wasn’t) had to be stripped way, so he could truly SEE what was before him. He had to blind himself to the world to really SEE. In death he is favored, and the place where he dies (accepts his fate, who he is and what he did) becomes blessed (his good fortune).
I think of the goodness revealed in Christ’s week of passion leading up to the cross. We know the whole story. The disciples did not. They were blind and to a large extent because they were afraid. We today can, at least, articulate the goodness of God (though not fully understand the passion) as we can approach the story from all angles… BUT we struggle with it, with the goodness of God, in the daily grind, with our own issues and concerns–to say nothing of our fears. It is hard to trust God (the only one we know to be good), to trust Him to work all things for good in our particular narrow and perhaps myopic circumstances.
Only God is good, and we seek that goodness (hopefully) in all that we pursue, at work, in our homeschools, in our classical education, in our planning for the future. May our pursuit of classical literature play some part in helping us to see and understand what goodness is.