“In a world without beauty––even if people dispense with the word and constantly have it on the tip of their tongues in order to abuse it––in a world which is perhaps not wholly without beauty, but which can no longer see it or reckon with it: in such a world the good also loses its attractiveness, the self-evidence of why it must be carried out. Man stands before the good and asks himself why it must be done and not rather its alternative, evil.”

—Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: I Seeing the Form (Ignatius Press, p. 19).

I found the above quoted in an article by Hal Willis that details the contribution philospher, Roger Scruton made to the reaffirmation of beuaty as a vital componnent of the transcendentals. Willis makes the case that beauty is the thing that gives us wings to transcend the self for a moment, long enough to apprehend the true and the good. As a consequence of beauty’s flight, one is able to make contact with the real and what Scruton called conservatism: “love what is actual.” Beauty begins the journey of “un-selfing” (Iris Murdoch). Beauty raises one up long enough to love the good, true, and the beautiful that brought you.

Thinking of beauty in this way reminds me of something I, recently, heard Marilynne Robinson say in a conversation she had with Cherie Harder of The Trinity Forum. I’ll quote it here:

Cherie Harder: So much of what is beautiful does depend on our perception. You have probably one of your most beloved characters, John Ames, say that “Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a willingness to see.” You’ve said similar things, in your own voice as well as your character’s voice, which I am betting evoke no small amount of wistfulness in many of your friends, fans, and readers who would deeply like to see the same luminous beauty that you do. How does one learn to see?

Marilynne Robinson: By looking, basically. I consider the primary privilege of being a human being as a universal privilege of being able to watch light fall on things, watch vegetation live in the world in the complicated ways that it does. The shimmer, the effulgence, all these things, are simply there to be seen whether or not people choose to look at them—whether they relegate too many things to the category of ordinary or meaningless. That’s the original choice. But if you are interested in the nature of the experience of life on this planet, then very quickly all sorts of things begin to present themselves to you as mysteriously beautiful. Discovered beauty: no rarification or falsification, but the thing itself.

“I consider the primary privilege of being a human being as a universal privilege of being able to watch light fall on things…” What a simple and profound account of what it means to be human!

Also…I plan to make some time to watch a documentary with Roger Scruton on “Why Beauty Matters.” Maybe I’ll report back on that.

“Moral advance carries with it intuitions of unity which are increasingly less misleading. Courage, which seemed at first to be something on its own, a sort of specialised daring of spirit, is now seen to be a particular operation of wisdom and love…Freedom, we find out, is not an inconsequential chucking of one’s weight about, it is the disciplined overcoming of self. Humility is not a peculiar habit of self-effacement, rather like having an inaudible voice, it is self-less respect for reality and one of the most difficult and central of all virtues.”

Iris Murdoch (1970/2013) The Sovereignty of Good, Routledge, p. 93.

Nick Cave is batting 1,000 on his last few Red Hand Files newsletters. I shared a highlight from the last issue regarding writers block. This week, he connected the principle and practice of "mercy" to the problem with cancel culture. He wrote:

Mercy allows us the ability to engage openly in free-ranging conversation — an expansion of collective discovery toward a common good. If mercy is our guide we have a safety net of mutual consideration, and we can, to quote Oscar Wilde, “play gracefully with ideas.”

...It is a value we must nurture and aspire to. Tolerance allows the spirit of enquiry the confidence to roam freely, to make mistakes, to self-correct, to be bold, to dare to doubt and in the process to chance upon new and more advanced ideas. Without mercy society grows inflexible, fearful, vindictive and humorless.

The picture of a society without mercy reminds me of something I heard about mercy defined linguistically. The Hebrew word associates the experience with pregnancy. Mercy is like being pregnant. "Bearing with" the other in mercy requires genuine selflessness.

Ethicist and Church Historian, Walter Brueggemann makes the case that the most fundamental, human enemy of mercy is "the pattern of self-preoccupation." Krista Tippett interviewed Brueggemann some time ago on the podcast "On Being" and asked him, as Nick Cave was asked, to define "Mercy." Here's Brueggemann:

You may know that the Hebrew word for — Phyllis Trible has taught us that the Hebrew word for mercy is the word for womb with different vowel points. So mercy, she’s suggested, is womb-like mother love. It is the capacity of a mother to totally give one’s self over to the need and reality and identity of the child. And mutatis mutandis (translation: "things being changed that have to be changed"), then, mercy is the capacity to give one’s self away for the sake of the neighborhood.

Now, none of us do that completely. But it makes a difference if the quality of social transactions have to do with the willingness to give one’s self away for the sake of the other, rather than the need to always be drawing all of the resources to myself for my own well-being. It is this kind of generous connectedness to others. And then I think our task is to see how that translates into policy. Now we’re having huge political storms about whether our policies ought to reflect that kind of generosity to people other than us and people who are not as well-off as we are, or whatever.

I think that a community or a society, finally, cannot live without the quality of mercy. The problem for us is, what will initiate that? What will break the pattern of self-preoccupation enough to notice that the others are out there and that we are attached to them?

"Others are out there" means that mercy requires love as defined by Iris Murdoch. She says, "Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than yourself is real." Love initiates and invites mercy