Christians are called to find and praise what is good, true or beautiful wherever they happen to find it. Indeed, all three should be seen as related as three ways we encounter being, just as the ancient philosophers understood. Goodness can be and should be judged by beauty; beauty can be and should be judged by truth; truth can be and should be judged by goodness. Being is simple and one with itself, and yet our encounter with it can only be described by looking at it in different ways with different methods and under different categories of thought; when we do so we must remember what it is we are doing so that we do not end up closing ourselves to being by forgetting that the different ways we can encounter it are complementary of each other, and even if all those complementary descriptions are put together, they would still fail to capture the true essence of being.
This is true not only of being, but also when we discuss or look at one of its many facets: goodness is one and yet manifold. It is a universal which is realized in many particulars. Each of those particulars fully manifests what is good, and yet they do not exhaust it. Goodness is one and all that is good shares in that one goodness, participating in it, manifesting it in many different ways. To discuss what is good, we need to look at goodness as a universal and as a particular, realizing that both angles together complement each other: however, because what we are doing is a human enterprise, it is limited, and so we must know from the start that what we come up with will not present the fullness of what it means to be good. But because we are called to be good, we are called to examine what it means to be good, and whatever caveats we must put upon our examination of goodness, they must no hold us off from our enterprise. How are we to go about it? We must look at what it means to be good in a way where neither its universal nor the particular dimensions are rejected. This explains why it is valid and traditional for Catholics to look at the Gospel of Life and the dignity of all human life as one universal truth (and in this way Cardinal Bernardin’s famous discussion of the seamless garment of life is shown to be legitimate), while realizing that the individual ways we ought to live out that Gospel can be and will be difficult to know in real concrete situations. To fail to understand the unity of all that is good, to fail to understand the Gospel of Life presents to us one universal vision of the dignity of all human life, is to fall for nominalistic relativism which allows for no concrete morality. To fail to realize that this goodness and dignity must be understood and witnessed according to different ways to meet the different situations of life is to fall for universalistic monism. Both visions of humanity are ugly and must therefore be rejected: they cannot be true.
In our appreciation for what is good in humanity, we must look for what is beautiful, and raise it up above the mire in which it might be found in. While we can discuss evil, we must remember it only exists as a corruption of what is good. To embrace goodness is to show what it is that is good, and then to motivate that good to find its true and proper home, to exist in its proper modality. Thus it does not help us to look for evil and call things evil and to leave it at that: this way of looking at evil most likely will not free one held by its grip. They will not understand because they see what is evil as good, from a perspective which can be and should be called illusory and delusional, and yet it is an illusion with a solid basis and foundation. Because of this we must show them how ugly the situation actually is, how it cannot be true, and yet show how they got deceived into thinking it was by showing what aspects of it are good and praiseworthy. Then we must encourage them to turn to the greater good by showing how greater, more beautiful it is when it is found in its proper harmonious context. What is said here about the good can also be said about the truth or the beautiful: a lie is often an impartial, corrupted truth; ugliness can only exist as a corruption of being and form, a corruption of some greater beauty.
This has consequences for Catholics and the way they should look at the world and those living in the world. Just as we are called to recognize, embrace and cherish truth wherever we find it, even if it is found in a non-Christian source (as Vatican II points out), so we can and should recognize, embrace and cherish the good and the beautiful wherever we find it, even if we find them in places where we would not normally want to admit them. It is in this recognition we open up a way to dialogue with others, people who do not fully share our Catholic way of life; indeed this dialogue is important because it is one where we can lift others up instead of denigrate them; where we can help them become transfigured by grace instead of being annihilated by that side of them which is corrupted by evil.
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