Truth, Beauty, Goodness

At the roots of the western tradition stand these magnificent three: Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. Hailed by the ancient Greeks as the centerpoint of all human endeavor, these continue to guide us on our journey forward through time. We are here on earth to find what is true, to love what is beautiful, and to become good. Each of these could also be seen as an entire domain in human affairs: the world of philosophical pursuit, the artistic and creative pursuit of the aesthetic ideal, and the moral realm of highest quality and value.

When the time came the ancient Semitic tradition combined these with the dynamic sense of Presence which infuses these pursuits with a divine power guiding us: truth is not simply a lone pursuit to find what may be real, but a prophetic encounter with the divine reality which leads us collectively and individually into the truth. To discover beauty is not only the personal awareness of the patterns of creation all around us so full of intense and exquisite manifestations of harmony and magnificence. Beauty is also a form of wisdom, a theosophia, a divine seeing past the surfaces into the deep structure which determine all things. Goodness is not simply obeying a moral category external to us, but becoming ourselves a site where the divine qualities become manifest and are thus able to alchemically transforms us and the world around us.

So it is that we continue to pursue Truth, Beauty, and Goodness not as external categories, but as internal processes—not as abstract and impersonal principles, but as the wisdom we live daily and discover personally within the laboratory of our own beings.