Transcendentals: Kreeft @ CWR

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 CWR: The three transcendentals are the true, the good, and the beautiful. How are these all intertwined?

Kreeft: The intertwining of truth, goodness, and beauty is based on being. Non-being is neither true nor good nor beautiful. And neither is destruction, unless it is destruction of falsehood, paving the way for truth; of evil, paving the way for good; or ugliness, paving the way for beauty.

The triad corresponds to the three distinctively human powers of the soul, of course: mind, will, and heart (spiritual feelings, which animals lack). That is why our literature is full of this triad of protagonists: prophet, king and priest. Gandalf, Aragorn and Frodo; Spock, Captain Kirk, and “Bones” McCoy in Star Trek; Ivan, Dmitri, and Alyosha Karamazov; Quint, Hooper, and Brodie in Jaws, etc.

There are dim Trinitarian echoes here, of course. The Spirit is love, thus known by the heart; the Son is the Logos, the Mind of God; and the Father is Life and Will and Being itself, and the first cause and creator of all being. Of course all three Persons always work together, but insofar as we can distinguish aspects of Their work, we can attribute it more especially to one of the Persons. Hindu theology also mentions three attributes of Brahman: sat, chit, and Ananda; infinite being or life, infinite knowledge or truth, and infinite joy or goodness or love. St. John uses three terms for God, especially in his first epistle: light, life, and love. Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Also the three divine attributes that logically entail the startling good news that “all things work together for God for those who love God” are omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence. If God does not lack power, or life, or being, He gets whatever He wills; if He does not lack knowledge, He knows exactly the best way to get it; and if He does not lack love (goodwill), He wants it for all of us who also want it and choose it and allow Him to give us His gift, which is Himself.

In all these cases the one of the three that is always clearly present is the one associated with mind, logos, prophet, knowledge, truth. Love is sometimes classified with the one associated with life and will, and sometimes with the one associated with beauty and love and joy and the heart. Love itself is sometimes associated with the heart and feeling and sometimes with the will and choice. But despite the confusion and fuzziness, there are always three.

And this... .

CWR: In your recent book Ask Peter Kreeft, you mention that whenever possible you attend the Latin Mass. Is the beauty of this liturgy part of what draws you to it?

Kreeft: Yes, yes, and yes. It’s not just that Latin is a beautiful language, but that the beauty in the souls of the persons who designed the Mass (and I am speaking of three kinds of persons here, human and angelic and divine) comes through the words and inspires the reverence in both the celebrant and the congregation. I read recently that 1-2 percent of Catholics who attend the Latin Mass also participate in the sacraments of our secular society: contraception, divorce, abortion, sodomy, even pornography. It is a startling statistic (like the 1-2 percent divorce rate among those who use NFP), yet not startling at all. In Heaven we will not even be tempted to such evils, and the Mass gets us closer to Heaven. All Masses do, but especially the old one. Its only rival for reverence and beauty is the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, which has also been authorized for Mass, with Catholic changes and additions, in the “Anglican Use Mass” for the ordinariate for Anglicans who become Catholics. Of course it’s beauty that draws me to it, but it’s not just aesthetic beauty but spiritual beauty, “the beauty of holiness.”

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