The Holiday is not over! The Church is not stingy like the secular culture and knows better than to try to squeeze all the jollification we need into one day.

There are still ten days to go. . . but still St. Stephen’s Day can seem a bit pale. Many of us have to go back to work. . . and our secular culture strips the decorations down too quickly just as they put them up too quickly. What seemed possible on Christmas day, love and joy to the world, seems a bit less clear on St. Stephen’s Day. After, wasn’t Stephen the first martyr?

Traditional Christians understood that the joy of birth also reminds many of us, the next day in the hang over from the party (!), of the pain of death. How can we know? How can we hope that the promise of Christmas is real?

Opinion is easy to come by, knowledge hard. It took but a moment for me to type that a film that took years to make is bad. If this is mere opinion, then there is no particular reason to value it. Knowledge, if it can be obtained, would be preferable. People recognize this when it comes to medicine and nobody is shocked finding the truth is hard work when it comes to understanding nature.

In human things (the arts), opinion controls most peoples lives. “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.” The assumption is that in politics, art, literature, and especially religion one idea is as good as another as long it is tolerant for somebody else’s preference. A music class in high school might as well use U2 as Bach if the teacher prefers U2 or believes that students will “get more” out of it. Music is a personal subject and not an area of knowledge.
It wasn’t always this way. Until the nineteenth century, almost all people in Western culture believed that poetry, music, art, and religion could teach something. Physical reality was best known by “natural philosophy” which is now called science, but physical reality was just one part of a greater whole.

However opinion will not do when facing the rocks that were thrown at Stephen. He needed to know and through reason and revelation such knowledge was available to the classical Christian.

Humans knew through best reason and divine revelation that men are unique. Though even the ancients knew how physically small and powerless men were next to the cosmos, they also understood that the ability to reason and create works of beauty was remarkable. The universe is dazzlingly complex and worthy of study, but so are human creations like the Iliad and the Bible.

Christian civilization, which produced science, the modern university, and loved the arts, sought to flourish as beings created in the image of God. Though fallen, men must live, raise children, and create culture. No such culture will be utopia, but each should as much as possible reflect the soon coming perfect society of the New Jerusalem. No ruler can be King Jesus, but each ruler should be as much like Him as possible.

The Kingdom is utterly perfect and humans have chosen to think about that perfection in three different ways: goodness, truth, and beauty. However, modern Christians have made issues that are culturally relative or personal absolute and assume beauty is subjective. Tell a Church group the topic of discussion is clothing and the next word to come to their minds will be “modesty.” What is modesty? This will shift from culture to culture and even from person to person. On the other hand, traditional Christians have believed that beauty is universal and should be a goal in all humans do.

When my daughter was small, we were discussing this issue. To show her the difference between modesty and beauty, we googled the phrase “Mormon prom dress” and took a look at some of the sites. She quickly said, “These dresses are very modest, but they are not very beautiful.” It was clear to her that the main goal of these dress designers had been to meet cultural subjective standards of modesty. She realized that women want to be beautiful, not merely modest since modesty is the absence of a vice while being beautiful is to reflect the Divine. (My Mormon friends point out that the situation is now much better. . . for which I am sure many young ladies are thankful!)

The goal of a Christian is to be good and not merely not-bad. Yet again, in many discussions the goal is to stamp out vice (“No more coveting!”) and not to increase true love. Similarly excellent education longs for truth and would not settle for falsehood, yet too often teaching in Christian circles focuses on heresy hunting or destroying error and not loving truth. A man cleansed from all wrong beliefs could have no ideas at all! Some Christians live this, but then focus on the culturally relative application of beauty (modesty), goodness (manners), or truth (pedagogical style).

All three have been challenged in this age and this rejection of reality is at the heart of contemporary sickness. Truth is the hardest to deny and even now few challenge it. Some forms of post-modernism attempt to deny the existence of truth or that truth can be known. It is difficult for most philosophers to take these claims or worries seriously. Any five year old can keep asking, “How do you know?” but a wise man wants a reason for his doubts as well as his beliefs.

Humans cannot be certain about most things, but still can be said to know them. “Knowing” for Christians has traditionally meant having sufficient reason, through some combination of argument, revelation, or experience, to accept an idea as opposed to its opposite. Arguments about human things in particular will never be conclusive, but only plausible and probable. Traditionally, Christians have been satisfied by experience, the Revelation of God in His Word, and decent philosophical arguments that goodness, truth, and beauty have a reality apart from human thought . . . at the very least as ideas in the mind of God.

Most people worry about the reality of goodness, truth, and beauty for bad reasons. After all, there is no reason to think that the human heart has been changed by the advance in technology. Moderns may fly space shuttles, use the Internet, and are able to carry movie libraries in their pockets, but are emotionally much the same as the Victorians or the ancient Greeks. Love and hatred may rise for different reasons, but the feeling or experience seems the same. The machines have changed, but the men have not. In fact, the dire nature of skepticism about knowing the truth has caused even philosophers like W.V. Quine who were attracted to some skeptical arguments to pull back from post-modernism. It is hard to find a top philosophy department in the United States with much interest in it. Most well-trained Christian and secular philosophers are, therefore, in agreement that there is some kind of reality that exists apart from human thought and that this reality can be known.

Some facile Christians argue that “creeds” or theological propositions stifle debate when in reality they are the hard result of debate. . . and stimulate even more debate! To argue against creeds in the Faith is like a scientist arguing that the formulation of theories or laws in science cuts off progress!

In Christian circles, the reality of goodness is not often called into question. Morality is grounded in Divinity, revealed in the Word of God, and lived out in the community of Faith. Christians think goodness would exist even if there were no humans. Morality is not the creation of men, but of God.

This is in sharp contrast to popular culture where morality is a matter of opinion. At a secular school any claim that something is “just wrong” would be taken as a statement about the feelings of the speaker and not about reality. But Christians should not feel smug, because if secular neighbors pretend morality is relative so that they can cheat on their taxes, then Christians are equally intent on controlling their taste in art, music, and entertainment. If art contains the truth and contains morally uplifting ideas, then the fact that is ugly is “just an opinion” for most. “I like it” is good enough justification for the Christian consuming any amount of what most historic Christians would have known to be appalling trash.

In both Christian and popular secular circles, almost everybody agrees that Beauty is a matter of opinion. Begin a sentence, “Beauty is. . .” and most will end it with “in the eye of the beholder.” Since as recently as C.S. Lewis (died 1963), Christians were still relatively united on existence of Beauty (either as an idea on its own or in God’s mind), this is a remarkable change. Subjectivity about Beauty has become almost universal. How did this happen?

When in fifth grade, I was given a “fact-opinion” worksheet in English class like many students in primary school in the United States. On this sheet, I was taught to distinguish between “fact” and “opinion.” Facts included statements such as, “Lyndon Johnson was President of the United States.” Opinions included statements such as, “A rose is beautiful.” As C.S. Lewis points out in Abolition of Man, the most important essay of the twentieth century, lessons were being taught to me that had nothing to do with English. Essentially, without any argument Beauty was declared “subjective” and just a matter of personal opinion.

A consumer culture also encourages a passive acceptance of subjective Beauty. After all, companies want to move product. If “beauty is the in the eye of the beholder,” then mass media might be able to shape what beauty is. They have not economic interest in maintaining classical standards over time, but a high motivation to cater to personal tastes. Companies exist to go the customer what he or she desires not to educate them in what they should desire!
Is it any wonder that music, theater, and art are vanishing from education? The arts have vanished almost entirely from education before college and are under severe pressure as useless and expensive in the university. This is entirely reasonable if beauty is merely a matter of preference and opinion. The traditional Christian school views the arts as vital since they help educate about the nature of Beauty. If there is no Beauty, then the arts become a subjective “frosting on the cake.” Why should government pay to allow teachers to opine at students or institutionalize their private preferences?

Of course, none of this is an argument for the existence of Beauty, but before turning to this task, it is important to note what does not have to be done. We do not need to define Beauty before seeing that it exists. Many things humans believe are real are also hard to define. Most people cannot give very good definitions for things in which they have strong belief. If a philosopher were to walk down the street and ask for a precise definition of “street,” most people would struggle to give an adequate answer containing only the necessary and sufficient conditions for a thing to be a “street.” In fact, it is the very habit of philosophers to ask for this sort of definition which rightly irritates most of people with philosophers. After all, we walk down the street, know when we are “in the street” as opposed to our homes very successfully without ever knowing exactly how to define “street.” People can generally successfully separate sheep from wolves without being infallible or having perfect definitions of “sheep” and “wolf.” As we shall see, there are good reasons to think beauty exists even if philosophers find it hard to define it with perfect precision.

The Church claims that goodness is real, but finds its own members full of doubts. How could this not be true? Taught that Beauty is a matter of personal opinion, utterly subjective, Christians have no good reason to think morality, which is in many ways similar is objective.

We should remember that in the middle of human ugliness Stephen looked up and saw goodness, truth, and beauty. He saw Jesus and so was able to forgive and become beautiful. This grace transformed what should have been wicked and made it worthy of the Holidays. We can celebrate the First Martyr, because his vision of the enthroned Jesus made his death glorious!

The blood of Jesus is the ultimate example of this truth. Some moderns are fearful to speak of the precious blood atonement. While not the only Biblical image of salvation, it is still the most hopeful one. . . for Christ took death and His spilled blood and made it the basis for knowledge, revelation, jollification, and entry to paradise! The crooked was made straight, the rough places smooth!

That is why this “day after” we can celebrate even in our own small disappointments. Jesus Christ can make even those little crosses. . . the empty cubicle pulled clean of Holiday cheer. . . avenues of grace.

Merry Christmas, day two!