When I was eighteen years old, I wrote a treatise on Truth, by hand, laboriously. It has not survived, I am grateful to say. But I remember my conclusion: that there was no such thing as Absolute Truth (much as I had longed for it and tried to prove it), only various relative truths.
Most of the world now takes relativity in all things as an axiom, in part because we can reason our way to its conclusions. But I no longer agree: Truth does exist. The trick is that it does not yield itself, at least not as a whole, to logical explanation. Rather it is found—among other places—in Beauty, whether of music, or words, or paintings, or certain ceremonies, or natural things. This is a very old idea; we might associate it with the writings of the 18th-century Irish author, orator, and philosopher Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; here is an early 20th-century edition). Mr. Burke associated Beauty, found in something pleasing and of lovely form, with a category he considered higher: the Sublime, which is so powerful that it can instill in us not only joy but even terror. Mere Beauty, for him, was far less a thing than Sublime Beauty, and some things that were Sublime were not beautiful.
What is interesting in Mr. Burke's way of thinking is that Beauty, if Sublime enough, calls out deep emotion—and, I myself would add, profound spiritual experience. It might invite us to an intense joy, or it might make us uncomfortable or even frightened as it overwhelms us, pulls us deeper into itself. In our fraught and violent present world, in our frantic domination by speed and technology, it does us good to contemplate this Beauty. It is a slow kind of Truth that presents itself to us whole, as transcendence. We find it by a difficult move: reaching upward, courageously putting our own selves aside.
Photo by Alexandra Eddy