Truth and Beauty

A couple of interesting conversations over the last couple of days have got me thinking about the relationship between truth and beauty. First, I had the chance to talk over a couple of ideas related to my thesis with my brother during a rare visit out to Saskatchewan this past weekend. We spent some time last night on the nature of the new atheism’s protest against God/religion, and how as human beings we simply do not and cannot know as much as we might like prior to making decisions about ultimate matters such as these. The “what if we’re wrong about all this?” question still comes to mind now and then (at least my mind) and I suspect that this is a normal part of life for most people, whichever side of the atheist/theist divide they find themselves on.

But what if framing the question in this way represents a bias toward an overly cognitive understanding of faith, or the adoption of worldviews in general. What if our evaluation of the data isn’t, ultimately, the most important matter? The gospels, on the whole, seem to portray Jesus as much more interested in our behaviour than our ideas—in a specific kind of life, not acquiescence to the correct body of propositions about the nature of the world. And the kind of life Jesus lived, which we believe deserves/requires our emulation, is a worthy and admirable one indeed. Even if our theology is badly mistaken, a life modeled after the pattern of Jesus would still be a “good” and “beautiful” life.

At the end of Miroslav Volf’s Free of Charge there is a brief chapter entitled “Postlude: A Conversation with a Skeptic.” In it, Volf records the following hypothetical exchange between himself and a skeptic regarding what he would do if he found out that the whole notion of a generous God who gives and forgives, and who expects us to do the same, was nothing but an enormous lie:

Skeptic: “What if your dark thoughts at night—and my sober observations!—are true? What if you are waking up to a dream?”

Volf: “Well what?”

Skeptic: “You’d be wrong.”

Volf: “And I would have lived the right kind of life, the life you called beautiful.”

Skeptic: And have lived a false beautiful life! Wouldn’t that matter to you? Can a false life ever be good?”

Can a false life ever be beautiful? Can it be good? I’ve spent the last four months or so going through Lesslie Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society with a group of third and fourth year UBC students and today we were talking about his understanding of the relationship between reason, revelation, and experience. In the chapter we touched on this afternoon, Newbigin points out that all people are socialized into and inhabit a particular plausibility structure—a “taken-for-granted” way of thinking about and living in the world which privileges certain kinds of answers to certain kinds of questions.

Taken to the extreme, this understanding could lead to a form of sociological determinism where our options are completely determined by our social environment. How can we presume to tell others that they should adopt our worldview with this knowledge? Is it even possible to just accept a fundamentally different way of looking at and living in the world given what we know about the nature of belief formation and the myriad sociological and psychological factors that contribute to the process?

Well obviously it is. People do, after all, change their minds about matters of faith. But when they do it seems that more often than not it is the quality of someone’s life (or lack thereof) that proves most compelling, as opposed to the logical rigour (or lack thereof) of their argumentation. People respond to lives well lived—to “beautiful” examples of forgiveness, grace, compassion, kindness, patience, and joy. The beauty and goodness of a life could lead one to the conclusion that the foundation upon which it is based just might be true.

So what is the connection between truth and beauty? Whatever the answer to that question might be, I think that the fact that we seem to be hard-wired to expect, even demand that the two be linked is suggestive. Is it possible that a genuinely good and beautiful life would have no connection to what is ultimately true about the world? If so, what would we be claiming about the nature of the world? About human beings? About God?

At the end of the day, in light of the fact that epistemological certainty simply is not the sort of thing that is available to limited creatures such as ourselves, an attempt to live “the right kind of life” in the hope/expectation that this is a genuine reflection of what is true about the world seems like a good and useful response. Sociologist Peter Berger has said that “to have faith is to bet on the ultimate validity of joy.” I think that it is also to bet on a deep and permanent connection between truth and beauty—between the deepest aspirations of human beings and the way the world “really is” and will one day be.