Moral Purity

Lord,

You are all that is good, which is to say that you are perfect love, justice, wisdom, and temperance. The proportions that consist you are perfect, so the sum is perfect as well. From that, Plotinus would call you as both all pure good and pure beauty.

If you are such, does there exist any possibility of goodness and beauty in the mortal realm? In what ways?

I have seen a performer, a prominent pianist of our time, seem possessed by something beyond her. She looked like a “light and winged and holy thing”, and during her performance I could not think. I was indirectly possessed, for in front of us was a woman oriented towards something divine.

Something was transcendent about her performance, yet she remained on this planet as she played her piano. She emptied herself and reduced herself to a vessel, and within her something filled that void. It was truly beautiful, but still of this world. She is an example that the beautiful things of this human world are oriented towards you, but not of you.

Lord, I do love beautiful things, but if I am to be honest then I must admit I do not find them to be essential things. They remind me of the capability within the human spirit to transcend our means, our world, but all those moments are short-lived and temporary. I think of the majority of our fellow man who has no such care for things such as beauty, which is to say that they are more worried about necessary things (food, shelter, warmth). Proximity to beauty itself is a social privilege.

We must remind ourselves of the implicit beauty in that remains around us, like mathematics. Given the correct prism, even the most mundane light of things refract into something joyous.

I suppose I find a sense of injustice in things that are beautiful, but this anger may be misplaced. There are so many beautiful things in this world that remind us of what you are, but the ability to receive such beauty is disparate. Does the single mother have the same capability to sit in stillness and be seized by Gregorian chant? She is much more concerned about her earthly bread rather than the supernatural bread that the awe in pure beauty descends upon us. Beautiful things are not essential to absolute goodness, but they do remind us of you. Beautiful things always remain, but the ability to be seized by them is personal rather than impersonal.

Lord, I can only believe that all that is truly good must be impersonal. Grace has the capability to descend and fill the void of any person, at any moment, and it is not contingent. If the church claimed that “Jesus died for our sins”, that would be impersonal. If the church claimed that “Jesus died for our sins, but atheists will perish in hell”, that would be personal. All that is truly good is indivisible.

We can see this in the 21st century of judicial justice. The promise in modern civilizations is that all laws codified into our governments apply equally to all citizens, regardless of contingent factors. We aim to imitate your pure justice. This strive for perfect justice is implicitly shown in the anger and backlash when laws are not applied equally across men. Where there is corruption there is no such thing as justice. But, Lord, even with our best intentions there exist corporations which lobby for laws that disproportionately benefit them over man. They are not people, yet they have the ability to influence the lives of people. Is there actually such an idea of a pure justice in the realm of man?

Love holds another contradiction in the mortal realm, I would say: we claim to love things in their pure essence, yet we only love that essence as long as it stays near us. At the core of our human nature is this pull between us and other humans to create a rooted life, to form a web of relationships woven between everything relating to us and everything relating to our beloved. This love is possessive in the sense that we only love the abundance it provides. For most people, losing their beloved due to personal difference would be painful because that same web would be struck down in one movement.

The original sin of all beings is that we are placed into a world with both a real and imagined sense of scarcity, and so, Lord, we try to fill that lack onto death.

How would impersonal love in the moral realm ever be possible?

I suppose it would be quite simple to say that we humans are nothing but wise, and we possess no shred of wisdom within us. Socrates himself was proclaimed “the wisest man” solely because he understood this lack explicitly. He was the wisest man because he knew he would never be wise. This is probably the easiest to understand facet of you which we fail to meet.

Temperance is somewhat similar, but also contested. There are two extremes which we know in our society: the billionaire with an insatiable thirst for more and the willingly impoverished who hunger for little. The former is visible and many know, but the latter is hardly visible and few know. The ascetic willingly empties himself of the desire to fill that lack, but it hardly ever is a truly good thing in itself. He may wish for people who learn this of him to praise him, to approve of him, to mark him as ‘differently good.’ He is closer to being “poor in spirit”, but true balance of desire and reality is difficult.

I can’t imagine any true possibility of goodness within this world. It seems to me that scarcity encroaches upon all realms and seizes our being.

All I can ask for is mercy, but the true guiding principle is simply this: like Socrates, we must recognize that we are not wise, nor are we capable of clean love, nor are we capable of true justice, nor are we capable of true temperance.

Lord, the path towards you is, as Weil said, through decreation. In the beginning was you and you alone, which is to say in the beginning was love and love alone. We must liken ourself to become nothing so you can make something from nothing, or “let there be light.”

Our motives must be purified; addition through subtraction.

That is to say that when our being is pure then our actions will orientate towards you.

David