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As Long as You Are What You Are

As Long as You Are What You Are

Last updated on: October 30, 2018 at 8:16 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

As Long as You Are What You Are 2018-10-30T08:16:35-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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We sat talking, a mountain rising over us and a green valley beneath us. The beautiful buildings, some very old, some new, of the monestary fit the scene accenting natural beauty, drawing it out. The bells rang and our kind hosts served us bread and honey they had made. I still could smell traces of the frankincense from the church on my clothes.

Every truth spoken in that context had great force and the truth was combined with powerful beauty. The good people speaking brought together what is natural to be together. Beauty caught my attention, truth stirred my mind, and goodness made the power potent, but also protected us from harm.

This was (for a brief hour) an image of the Kingdom of God on Earth.

What We Were Right To Expect When Small

The good team should be beautiful. The truth should be spoken beautifully. Truth, beauty, goodness should be one seamless whole. When a little boy, this is what I expected. How could anything made by God be ugly? This is the good God’s world and so little children expect truths to come with lovely illustrations. When Mom read to us at night, my brother and I heard truth expressed beautifully by a good woman.

As small ones, we were right to loook for this convergence. Yet slowly our parents had to teach us that there was a brokenness in the cosmos. Free will, that good, beautiful gift of God, had been misused by angels and men to create falsehoods, ugliness, and evil. Fairy tales delivered the bad news, though with deep hope. An evil witch (as opposed to Glinda the Good!) might cast a tricksy spell and make the ugly villain appear fair. When the charm failed, the truth would be seen and the natural ugliness of evil exposed. The good God would bring justice and (someday) all those who chose the good would live happily ever after.

As we grew older still, we had to learn that sometimes the persuasive argument is not put in the service of the truth. Bad politicians would charm us with falsehoods and so spread lies to our harm. Beauty was good in herself, but beauty could also be used to deceive and could be as false as paint. Then we saw often we cared too little for truth, missed the enduring beauty for cheap trash, and were (ourselves) too little concerned with being good as with winning.

We were not as we wished, should be. This was bad news, but the hope of the fairy tale (so true!) endured. We could find mercy and be more than we were. The image of God in us was broken, we could not fix it ourselves, but there is a Savior.

Not Charming, Really Beautiful

The disappointment that the cosmos is broken, that we are broken, can tempt us to pretend. We can try to be satisfied with what appears to be beautiful, good, or true. What our badly educated taste immediately desires, or is sold by commercials, is attractive . . . Virtually beautiful. The opinions we got with an educational credential are a substitute for truth.

Soon we are not looking for beauty, just satisfaction. We don’t want justice, just victory. Truth is what the team we associate with, our gang, party, or fellow alum say we say.

This is a charm we cast on ourselves to make the world seem as it should be now.

The hardest trick is the one we play on ourselves where some small good, some partial truth, and some fleeting beauty causes us to miss enduring goodness, the splendor of great truth, and immortal beauty. We become less than what we are created to be. At the worst, people (not so different than me!) trick themselves into thinking the Soviet Union, gulags and all, is a paradise.

The tyrant is a comrade. The labor camps are a piece of a worker’s paradise.

There is danger when beautiful words are attached to falsehoods. Why? Beauty is persuasive and a person should be drawn to the beautiful. Beauty is the most powerful rhetoric: transforming what might otherwise be mundane into the sublime.

Plato understood. He knew the world that is as it should be: divine, unchanging, real. He saw where the cosmos came short and that men pulled the wholeness apart: goodness, truth, and beauty no longer one. Plato disenchanted the rhetoric of the sophists. Disillusioning the man who has self-enchanted is dangerous: Plato’s master Socrates had been killed for the effort.

Plato worked indirectly, suggesting in his books that goodness, truth, and beauty should never be pulled apart. Humans can only be happy when our right expectations from childhood are shown to us. When we see the Divine, we know where we have been and where we are going, even if we are not there now.

So Plato begins his great dialog on love and beauty with two dear friends meeting in the country. Socrates asks his friend “Where have you been? Where are you going?” (Whence? Whither?) Socrates finds his handsome friend Phaedrus has been charmed by a sophist’s speech on love. Slowly, as they sit in the country under a plane tree, the two are freed from illusion. In conversation, beauty is connected to goodness and goodness to truth.

Socrates says to his beloved friend Phaedrus:

I believe you, as long as you are what you are.

Phaedrus is physically attractive and so commands attention when he speaks. As long as he is physically beautiful, he has power. Socrates sees that Phaedrus also loves truth and has a natural modesty. What if together they could find the truth?

As long as Phaedrus is what he is, then splendor will result. Socrates helps restore Phaedrus by telling him new stories: philosophical fairy tales that point in the right direction. The expectations of the child are restored, but with realism about reality as it is. Together both Socrates and Phaedrus are freed of the illusions of false love, distorted friendships, and made true friends. They leave together having become moderate, sane, and hopeful.

Plato’s image is as it can be for all of us. What he saw dimly, we can see more fully in glimpses of what will be when (so rarely!) the Church is the Church. We saw it at the monestary in Georgia in the truth of the conversation, the beautiful surroundings, and the deep goodness of the bread and honey.

We are not yet where we are going, but we can get up and follow the good, true, and beautiful God together.

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