Lucy Beckett on "The Order of Love"

The Order of Love | Lucy Beckett | From the Introduction to In the Light of Christ: Writings in the Western Tradition

This book is about value, specifically the value to us now, in the twenty-first century, of some great texts written in relation to the truth of orthodox Christianity, or, in the case of pre-Christian texts, understood in the light of that truth. These texts, many of which have long found places in familiar versions of the Western canon, belong or are in various ways close to the Catholic, specifically the Augustinian Catholic, tradition, and it is the thesis of this book that their value--that is to say, their truthfulness, beauty and goodness--rests in their relation to the absolute truth, beauty and goodness that are one in God and that are definitively revealed to the world in Christ.

That the value of these texts is real, and that it is relative--but not relative to nothing--are both now highly contentious and in some academic circles even ridiculous statements. In the intellectual climate of the liberal West in our time, the very words "truth", "beauty" and "goodness" cannot be used without embarrassment except in relation not to God but to the individual, who, a biological accident in a random universe, chooses what seems, for the moment, to be true or good or beautiful to himself. That individual may defend such choices, but on personal, subjective grounds only; the one remaining moral imperative commanding general assent is that the choices of others must have equal status to one's own and should not be regarded as bad unless they do harm to others, measurable in a utilitarian fashion. Anyone may try to persuade others that his view, his perspective, is "better" than theirs, but this effort will be no more than a game, a power game, played in emptiness. Nietzsche, who presides over the contemporary academy, toward the end of the nineteenth century called "perspective" the basic condition of all life and the "will to power" the basic drive of the human world. "Truth", Richard Rorty, a strong philosophical voice on both sides of the Atlantic, has said, "is what your contemporaries will let you get away with." [1] In what the English philosopher Simon Blackburn has called "the après-truth salon", [2] temporary persuasion of more people than someone else can persuade is, while it counts, all that counts. The only intellectual consensus is that there is no consensus.

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Comments

[Nick Milne]

I know you're probably not able to say such things without it seeming like a conflict of interest, so I'll say it for you (and for myself, as well): this is an excellent book. Beyond excellent, really.

Buy it today. Start reading it tonight.

[Carl Olson]

Nick: All I can say, in light of a potential conflict of interest, is that I fully support your right to praise Beckett's excellent book. ;-)

[Nick Milne]

Careful--they can't suspect that we're in collusion.