Yearning for Something Better

"We pursue the true, the good, and the beautiful,
even though the false, the nasty, and the messy 

might have been just as useful to our genes."

What was it that attracted me to this statement by the contemporary philosopher Roger Scruton?  In part, it was my knowing that Truth, Goodness, and Beauty have been held by Christianity to be the three classic avenues through which we come to know God.  But something more immediate influenced me, something about human society today.  In a world in which we are told by some people not that there are additional facts but that there are "alternative facts," and told by still others that "truth isn't truth," it can be hard to find our bearings.  Hard to restore our grounding.  Scruton's statement reminded me that there is something within us that yearns for something better.

My responses to Scruton's words began to resonate with the picture on the cover of Scruton's book The Soul of the World.  It was a painting by the great 17th-century master Nicolas Poussin titled "Landscape with a Calm."  That painting (see below) does indeed convey an air of calm, with a herder and animals in the foreground, still water and sheep in mid-ground, and a gentle slope and stable architecture in the background.  A diffused sunlight bonds all the elements together.

Researching in an art book, I found out that although Poussin lived in the era of effusive baroque art, there was in Poussin a "conscious attempt to suppress feeling....[Nevertheless,] his paintings are hardly ever cold or lifeless."  That is because there is in them, even if it is subtle, "an emotional tension -- a tension developed between the imaginative force of the informing idea and the strict discipline of the means used to control and express it."  Poussin sought with his landscape paintings to convey more than a landscape.  He sought to convey not the surface complexity (or possible chaos) of the world but to hint at enduring truths obscured by our human disorders.  Even in his twenties, he had written:

"My nature leads me to seek out and cherish things that are well ordered,
shunning confusion which is as contrary and menacing to me
as dark shadows are to the light of day."

There it was: Echoing down from centuries ago, a statement of Poussin that there was also in his nature a yearning for an orderly, truthful dimension that lies beneath the visible surface of this too-often darkened world.

Moreover, isn't the yearning within us for some stable ground a yearning for more than truth? Isn't it also a yearning for something we can trust?  And for people we can trust?  (The chief cause of broken friendships is betrayal.)  If the yearning is for more than truth, it would be a yearning also for goodness in our relationships to the world.  And a yearning for a kind of beauty that is not always visible to our physical eyes.  Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

~ ~ ~

Is there a way you try to restore your bearings in a world in which, it seems, "anything goes"?

(The quotes by Scruton are from The Soul of the World, © 2014, pp. 5 & 6.)

(The quotes by and about Poussin are from The Age of Baroque by Michael Kitson
in the series Landmarks of the World’s Art, © 1966 p. 73.)