4 min. read
Too often, I think, we forget that we all desire the good. Sometimes it takes tragedies, like the recent spate in Orlando, to remind us of our first love.
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In recent years, I’ve realized that all my vocational endeavors have been weak attempts to pursue what is good, beautiful, and true. Here I’d like to look at a few aspects of “the good.”
I now realize that vocation is unnecessary for pursing goodness, beauty, and truth. This pursuit is rightly situated in the life of the mind which is active contemplation.
Pursuing the Good
But what is necessary to encounter goodness?
That which is good is anything that rightly orders our desires and social constructs. From my world view, this goodness is divine and manifests itself in particular times and places; that is to say, bodily. So it is primarily through other humans, not human systems. The good is most tangible through assembled individuals, not from dogmatic institution. Indeed we would be hard-pressed to find the good merely in strict organization these days, whether civic, religious, political, or otherwise.
When Jesus spoke of gathering an ecclesia he wasn’t referring to a new organized religion. He was specifically talking about groups of people gathered together with one thing in common: following him. We might think of the ecclesia as those who pursue “the good” together.
An All Too Short List of Goodness
So, goodness has something to do with a radical understanding of formation. With this lens, the good can be found in many varied and diverse bastions of humanity.
- There is something good in reading the classical Greeks and Romans. For me, Homer, and Plato, and Aristotle, and Xenophon reveal it. Virgil, Cicero, Seneca, and Quintilian evidence it.
- There is something good in the pre-Medieval and Medieval scholastics. It is discovered through Augustine, Aquinas, John of Salisbury, Gregory the Great, Hugh of St. Victor, Christine de Pizan, Vives, and Erasmus.
- There is something good in the Renaissance humanists. It shouts its presence through Shakespeare, Vico, More, and de Montaigne.
- Also there is something good in the existentialists. Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, de Beauvoir, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty speak to it, though often indirectly.
- There is something good in traditions outside my own. It shines through Rumi, Thich Nhat Hanh, Achebe, and Meskavayh.
- There is something good in post-Enlightenment writers. It redounds from Babbitt, Lewis, Chesterton, Sayers, and Eliot.
This is an incredibly truncated list of the “democracy of the dead” who point the way for us to the good. These thinkers were prophets of a time not their own. I encourage you to look up any of their names and read whatever work of theirs you can find.
The Good in Companionship
As for the living, certainly there are writers, but there are also many others. My wife, my children, my extended family, my dearest friends, and even my enemies contain something that illuminates what is good.
Science teaches us many good things, and I am grateful for those who practice those mechanical arts. But there is something more profound we learn only through the pursuit of humane study; something that is only glimpsed in a liberated mind; something fine and rare that can only be realized through the constant struggle of pursuing the good in the human race.
The practice of companionship with others is not easy, nor is it safe. It requires a certain posture that bends us toward others. This goodness seems to be contained in a specific declaration from the ancient Hebrew prophet:
If you get rid of unfair practices,
quit blaming victims,
quit gossiping about other people’s sins,
If you are generous with the hungry
and start giving yourselves to the down-and-out,
Your lives will begin to glow in the darkness,
your shadowed lives will be bathed in sunlight.— The voice of the God YHWH as rendered in Isaiah 58.9-10
This call for humility, solidarity, and charitable love is very good indeed.
Personal and communal tragedies are something we never wish to encounter. But we do, and we will. May we first be humble in their wake. And then may we allow them to remind us of what is good, where it is found, and who shows us paths to it.
The prophet Isaiah continues his discourse above with a statement rich with hope. If we seek the good, together, here’s what might happen:
I will always show you where to go.
I’ll give you a full life in the emptiest of places—
firm muscles, strong bones.
You’ll be like a well-watered garden,
a gurgling spring that never runs dry.
You’ll use the old rubble of past lives to build anew,
rebuild the foundations from out of your past.
You’ll be known as those who can fix anything,
restore old ruins, rebuild and renovate,
make the community livable again.— from Isaiah 58.11-12
Restoring what is ruined, fixing and renovating brokenness, making communities livable again: these are certainly good things.
May we find life — good life — even in the emptiest of places.