At Catholic Online today, Fr. Dwight Longenecker has an article on “Why Catholics Should Build Beautiful Churches.” Featured is an interior by that brilliant young architectural designer, Matthew Alderman, who is also one of the editors over at Dappled Things, which is (in case there is still anyone who doesn’t know) the only Catholic literary print periodical in the country. The church is Our Lady of the Rosary, proposed for the Greenville, S.C., parish. Father Longenecker writes in his always lovely and lucid prose a brief answer to the “why” in the title of his article. He doesn’t refer to Keats’ melding of truth and beauty, which so often happens in longer reflections on the topic.
I remember having my students take those famous lines from “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
and write an argumentative essay in which they agreed or disagreed with the poet. The result was always the same: they disagreed. They argued that beauty deceives, that beauty “often” lies, conceals corruption and evil. It may or may not be relevant that I taught in small-town South Georgia. My students were fundamentalist protestants of only slightly varying degrees of difference (which they’d argue about in a heartbeat, given the opportunity). Not a Catholic among them.
How pervasively was that War Between the States won by the Puritan North against the (then) mostly Cavalier South. It was only the revival that swept the South during the suffering of the Reconstruction era that transformed it into the Puritanical “Bible Belt” that it is today. It’s one thing to lose sovereignty, property, and even life, quite another to lose one’s soul. Never was any perceived enemy of the United States invaded and more thoroughly and brutally defeated than the Confederate States of America, but despite the cruelty of northern oppression that it’s too politically incorrect to talk about, the South didn’t lose its soul until it got “revived.” Beauty is not truth; beauty deceives—it’s evil, you know.
Amen!
Glad someone has the guts to point it out. And by that I mean both the South’s suffering at the hands of the North (I say this as a Northerner myself), and the ugly Puritanism of the present day South (and fundamentalism in general) They may still be Christian, but the hatred of Beauty is not Christian at all.
Again I say Amen, thank you Dena
Thanks for your comment, R.C. You’re the first Northerner I’ve ever encountered who said that. Even most Southerners won’t speak of it.
Dear Paul,
I suppose we could discuss the many metaphorical uses of the term “puritan” and put Keats in there someplace. However, I merely used the lines as a springboard for my students’ argumentative essay.
By the way, you probably know as much or more of that period of American history as most Americans do.
Thanks for commenting.
From Keats’ admonition,
“that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
one could argue it is he who is the puritan.
I agree with the gist of what you’re saying, though I’m ignorant of American history (I’m Canadian).
@Dena Hunt
Well I’m an uncommon Northerner 😉
The truth is the truth, plain and simple. Slavery was not a good thing (though not every Southerner was fighting for slavery, see Robert E. Lee and ‘Stonewall’ Jackson for example) but the North’s rape of the South was no better. Two wrongs don’t make a right, as my mother used to tell me.