Offering: February 12, 2022

Truth, Beauty & Goodness

Image description: A creek in rural Pennsylvania, with cut-outs of six characters from Pamela Colman Smith’s Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, from left to right they are Ace of Cups, The World, Ten of Wands, Ace of Wands, The Hierophant.

To listen to me read this offering aloud, click here.

I’ve been busy this week preparing to offer a Tarot 101 class, the first in a few months. I’ve done versions of the class since the start of the pandemic here in the United States, and took a break from doing it because it started to feel mechanical, like I was going through motions and had lost touch with why. 

The best thing about the 101 class for me is that if I can resist the slide into calcification—presenting the same material in the same way over and over again—I get to go back down to the studs, recall and pay respects to the heart of what Tarot is for me. So there’s something about class prep that becomes like a love ritual, it feels devotional, which is nice. 

In last week’s offering I quoted Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast, on ritual, in which he refers to three dimensions of reality: Truth, goodness and beauty. I knew little about these three dimensions aside from Steindl-Rast referencing them, and when I went down a rabbit hole about theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar—who wrote the afterword in Meditations on the Tarot and whose work Shelly Rambo draws from in Spirit and Trauma—I stumbled on a whole lot more which was a delight. So I’m going to share a bit here on what I found regarding truth, goodness, and  beauty.

In an article about Balthasar’s work by Catholic author Stratford Caldecott, Caldecott wrote that for Balthasar, theology was supposed to be a study of “the fire and light that burn at the center of the world.” (Which feels like Ace of Wands to me!) But for Balthasar, the theologians of his time had reduced this study “to the turning of pages in a desiccated catalogue of ideas, a kind of butterfly collection for the mind” (2001). 

In a lot of ways I feel this about psychology, too, but that’s a rant for another time. So Caldecott writes that for Balthasar, “The true God is to be found…at the converging-point of the common or "transcendental" properties of being that we call Truth, Goodness and Beauty. Having lost touch with these virtues, Balthasar felt that “theologians had betrayed even the very Master they claimed to serve” (2001).

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Before I left my job in psychology and self-help publishing, though I was unhappy with the work itself, I interviewed with lots of other publishers in different genres hoping a lateral move would spark my interest again. I was walking to an interview with a cookbook publisher in San Francisco one day when I saw a print of Susan O’Malley’s mural in a shop window, which read in all capital letters:

“IT WILL BE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN YOU COULD EVER IMAGINE.” 

I didn’t get the job, and ultimately left book publishing, but the words on that poster made me feel good and I never forgot it. In Aidan Nicholas’ book A Key to Balthasar: Hans Urs von Balthasar on Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, the author writes that a function of beauty was to “make us aware that in knowing we receive more than we project” (2011). What that means to me is that reality really is more than we can ever expect, and what we plan to see will pale in comparison to what we really see, if we have the eyes and interest.

I can’t help but think of Parzival here. When he goes to the grail castle the first time, he sees a dazzling, intricate, and beautiful scene. But it’s only when, tempered by time and a handful of hard lessons, he has the wisdom and curiosity to go back to the castle and ask the wounded king—and care to hear the answer—“What are you going through?” that he wins the grail and becomes king, himself. (Ace of Cups)

“Reality is more fundamentally a gift to us than it is a construction by us,” writes Nichols. “How could we be amazed by being in its beauty,” he continues, “if what we call knowledge of the world tells us more about us than it does about it — more about ourselves than about the world in all its variegated splendor?” (2011). In psychological terms, he’s talking about projection. 

Realizing I had much more to learn about truth, beauty and goodness, I dug more. I came across a book by Harvard professor and psychologist Howard Gardner called Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed. Gardner seems to have some fundamentally different views on reality than Balthasar does, but I found his introduction to the virtues of truth, beauty and goodness really useful.

He begins by acknowledging that in a post-modern era, connected more and more globally through technology like social media, it’s harder and harder to justify universals of any kind. It feels more clear each day that what’s true for me is not true for the next person and same goes for beauty and goodness. Rightfully so, people are increasingly concerned not only with is it true, beautiful and good, but to whom and for whose benefit?

But Gardner also feels strongly that this trio of truth, beauty and goodness do have a shared, transcendental quality. He argues that, “every known civilization has developed a conception of which statements are true and which are false; which experiences are considered to be beautiful, ugly, or banal; and which human actions and relationships are deemed good, compromised, or frankly evil” (2012). 

He cites Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle who explicitly defined these terms. From there it was easy for authoritarian and totalitarian governments to claim ownership over the parameters of truth, beauty and goodness in order to justify violence. Gardner quotes George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, namely the fictional Ministry of Truth’s declaration that “War is peace, Freedom is slavery.” 

Gardner argues that as conditions are constantly changing, so too will what’s true, beautiful and good. And while authoritarian claims on what constitutes each is obviously a problem, the structures themselves are useful in that they help us “determine what is essential, what cannot and should not be scuttled, what is no longer relevant or justifiable, and what ought to be reconceived going forward” (2012).

From my limited perspective it’s definitely easy to argue against standardized truth, beauty and goodness. If beauty is the ultimate then why, in fairytales, are characters rewarded who show compassion to the hideous? Does not goodness as an ideal proliferate shame and self-criticism? These are real questions with real, day-to-day consequence. 

But maybe these questions are all part of renegotiating truth, beauty and goodness and maybe it’s right to. Our growing awareness of the plurality of The World means that truth, beauty and goodness can no longer be defined by what they are not. A quick glance at Twitter is all it takes to remember that the antithesis of your truth is the whole essence of someone else’s. If it can’t be about opposites, then we’ve got to do a bit of rethinking. 

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I’ve cited Meditations on the Tarot countless times in these last years and I feel like I’m telling a secret when I say that I actually just finished it last week. In my defense, it’s 658 pages and it’s a book you have to be in the mood for to understand. I’ve told the story of how this book came into my life before, but I’m going to tell it again. And it’s a bit winding. 

So I started to pray daily around the same time that I started doing daily yoga. My prayer was always very informal, some variation of “Dear God, thank you for…” and I’d say, aloud, on my daily, early morning drive to yoga, the things I was thankful for.

It was years of daily prayer before Valentin Tomberg’s book Meditations came into my life, but it wasn't until Meditations that I started to feel the pull toward a practice that was more formal. For obvious reasons, I didn’t resonate with the “Our Father, who art in heaven” I’d grown up with—didn’t believe in it, didn’t appreciate addressing a man, was dubious about heaven. And so on.

Doing the sign of the cross—which is where you touch your forehead, chest, left and right shoulder and say “Father, Son, Holy, Spirit” as you do it— was a no for me, too, for all those reasons and more, and while “Hail Mary” was marginally better I didn’t like the part where we had to say “The Lord is with thee” as if that was what made her valid, since it was implied that the Lord was a man. I had hang ups on hang ups, and rightfully so. 

I’d been living in the Bay Area when I started doing daily yoga and daily prayer, and in 2016 I moved back East—first to Nashville then Philadelphia after a five-month stay in Kingston. I started and finished social work school while living in Philly and the summer I graduated went back to Berkeley to visit friends and see my yoga teacher. While I was there, I wound up signing a lease for a place in the hills where I’d write the first draft of my book. 

I didn’t really want to move back to the Bay. It was impulsive and also a bit compulsive for reasons I don’t feel comfortable getting into here. But suffice it to say that the Bay was never home for me and as hard as I tried I couldn’t make myself someone for whom it would be (and trust me, I tried). Conversely, I’d felt almost instantly at home in Philadelphia, and really should never have left.

But for whatever reason, I did a version of something I’d done many times before which was signed the lease, flew back home, ignored what I knew and got to sifting, tossing, sorting, labeling, taping, lifting, hauling and once again, leaving. By Thanksgiving, my unessential books, clothes, cookware and records were in a Center City storage space and I was living in Berkeley in what I came to call the treehouse. I regretted what I’d done almost immediately and thought mostly of going home, but I had a job to do, my first book to write.

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In the style of yoga that I do, which is called Mysore-style Ashtanga, many people do it six mornings a week, ideally with a teacher. I was fortunate to have found a good teacher in Philly, but was happy to be back in Berkeley if for no other reason than that I could practice with my first teacher of nearly a decade, Vance Selover. 

One day after practice, pretty soon after I’d touched down back in Berkeley, there was a pile of books for giveaway by the door. In it was a pristine unread copy of Meditations on the Tarot which I’d never heard of, or seen. I took it home because I was preparing for a class on the Major Arcana which I’d clumsily named “Demystifying the Major Arcana.” 

On an especially regretful day—gray and raining and dark in the treehouse which didn’t get much light to begin with—I was working on the class material and feeling frustrated with The Hierophant. Looking back, this is not surprising. The symbols in this image are explicitly religious, while the class, and most of my work at that time, looked at Tarot through the aggressively secular lens of behavioral psychology, which has little to do with religion. 

I say religion here in the etymological sense of the word being to do with re-binding. Re-binding to what, you ask? Well, Earth maybe, and to each other, to kin. And I say kin in the sense that Donna Haraway tells it, as “a wild category that all sorts of people do their best to domesticate." I say kin as something probably much thicker than we can see, and more inclusive. Something that asks us to “stay with the trouble” of the hardest questions there are, about care. 

Psychology as I knew it then, dealt little with care beyond the individual, and so I was finding it hard to connect with symbols of religion or re-binding of any kind. At a loss, I picked up Meditations and turned to the fifth letter. So this book—for the uninitiated here—has a one-page foreword by the author and is followed by twenty-two letters starting with the Magician and ending with The Fool and then The World.

The Anonymous author—later outed as Valentin Tomberg—says that the fifth arcanum, The Pope in his book, or The Hierophant in the Rider-Waite-Smith, is a card to do with benediction and prayer. I was hooked at the very first line, which reads: “The Card “The Pope” puts us in the presence of the act of benediction” (2012).

If you study or train in behavioral therapy then you know that this idea of being blessed from something beyond the self is not a thing that's considered in that work. The emphasis is on behavior change, and that’s change that can be enacted for and by oneself. And while that change obviously exists in the context of relationship with others, the focus and onus is pretty much always—in my experience—on the individual. 

There are a lot of situations where it’s the right thing to do to build personal agency and power. And I believe there’s a place for the hope that one might also be blessed without having necessarily “earned” or worked for it (Ten of Wands). The blessing need not come from a God, or the Divine, but how about time, or evolution, or cells clustering together and breaking apart in a learning process? There are so many ways to be blessed. 

Still, in Tomberg’s telling benediction is not passive. He frames the process in terms of circulation, like blood, pointing to the two columns in the image as representing the “twofold current,” of prayer and benediction. He also connects the two columns with the pillars of justice in Kabbalah’s Tree of Life—the pillars of mercy and of severity. “Because it is Severity which stimulates prayer and it is Mercy which blesses,” he writes (2002).

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An idea that’s really stayed with me from Mediations is that, when it comes to formal prayers—the Our Fathers and the Hail Marys and I’m using examples from my own traditions here but there are obviously many beyond these—there’s magic involved in saying them. 

Tomberg calls formal prayers like these “prayer-formulas” and wants the reader to know that one is never alone when saying them. Rather, all the vigor and passion with which they’ve ever been said is evoked through the recitation, as if a prayer were an archive of affect and ancestry, of severity and of joy. 

I hold this in mind when I say prayers—whether I’m at the top of a mountain, with vision for days or fifty miles deep, doing a butterfly stroke through lava, melting into a new shape. I envision linking up with every other being who’s ever said the same words, treading some similar terrain. Like my grandmothers, who had their share of heights and depths. I feel the truth that, as Tomberg writes, “One never prays alone.” And that each prayer is consecrated by use, made sacred. It is imbued with a “magical virtue, since it is collective” (2002).  

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Sources

Anonymous. (2002). Meditations on the Tarot: A journey into Christian Hermeticism. TarcherPerigee.

Caldecott, S. (2001). An introduction to Hans Urs von Balthasar. Catholic Educational Resource Center. https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/catholic-contributions/an-introduction-to-hans-urs-von-balthasar.html

Gardner, H.E. (2012). Truth, beauty, and goodness reframed: Educating for the virtues in the age of truthiness and twitter. Basic Books.

Nichols, A. (2011). A key to Balthasar: Hans Urs von Balthasar on beauty, goodness, and truth. Baker Academic.