A Reclamation
In Defense of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful: On the Loss of Transcendence and the Decline of the West
by Jordan Cooper
In his extraordinarily dense little volume, The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis warns against the devolution of education, which he saw occurring in his own day. Fleeing the scene was the old understanding of education as virtue formation. No longer were students expected to search for the good, the true, and the beautiful so as to be shaped and conformed into those transcendentals. What Lewis dreaded was the mechanistic and flat conception of reality put forward by scientism, which stripped the cosmos of all sense of meaning. For the modern educators Lewis had in view, meaning was not real or objective, but was rather the imposition of wishful thinking. Lewis saw the writing on the wall, and he predicted that this kind of intellectual and educational shift would sow the seeds of Western civilization’s demise. It would produce a society of “men without chests.”
If a society of “men with chests” is one in which “the good life” is lived in conformity with the transcendentals rather than by self-expressive individualism, many (in Lewis’s day and in ours) might think they would rather have “men without chests,” but Lewis powerfully explains how this will lead to more than they bargained for: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful” (p. 26). If Lewis was predicting what a society of “men without chests” might look like eventually, we appear to have found ourselves in the position of being able to describe it from the inside. Our men have lost their chests. What is the way forward?
In his excellent new book, In Defense of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful: On the Loss of Transcendence and the Decline of the West, Jordan Cooper offers some suggestions. Unfortunately for those who are disposed to prefer quick fixes, he does not offer silver bullets. When it becomes clear that we took the wrong turn at a previous fork in the road, there is no path forward apart from going back. Cooper’s prescription on how to “put chests back into men” is simply to return to the old roads long abandoned: we need to recover the true, the good, and the beautiful. He paints a compelling picture of the classical vision of reality, a bleak picture of the late-modern version that has replaced it, and a hopeful picture of how we might—as individuals and communities—restore some of what was lost.
Surveying the Transcendentals
In Defense of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful is neatly divided into three sections with a total of six chapters, two for each transcendental. The first chapter in each section traces out the classical conception of the transcendental in question as it developed in the West. The second documents how the West forsook that transcendental, concluding with a list of suggestions on how we might reclaim it.
Cooper attempts all this in under 200 pages. To call his project ambitious is an understatement. Because of the massive scope he has to cover in a short space, it is appropriate to regard this work as a broad historical survey. Cooper plays the role of the generalist here, and he does it ably (a skill as increasingly foreign as it is necessary to the scholarly guild).
Truth:Beginning with the pre-Socratics and continuing on through Plato, Aristotle, and the biblical authors to the early Christians, Cooper summarizes the classical understanding of truth as “not merely . . . an assent to the reality of specific physical processes,” but as “grounded ultimately in the transcendent.” Hence, the classical vision of truth as portrayed by Cooper is a realist vision.
Cooper sharply contrasts this vision with the modern nominalist view, a vision we have inherited through Abelard, Ockham, Descartes, Hume, Kant, and the adherents of modern scientism and post-modern skepticism. He is careful to note that the fountainheads of the nominalist tradition surely did not intend their investment to yield the stinking and putrid fruit that it did (e.g., Peter Abelard and William of Ockham did not know their nominalism would produce Descartes’s doubt, and Descartes surely did not intend for his doubt to yield Hume’s skepticism, and so on), but the loss of transcendent reality cannot but lead to this situation. One cannot expect to see realist fruit grow off a non-realist tree.
Goodness: Regarding goodness, it is the same sad story told over again. Whereas “the Good” for Plato and Aristotle, the biblical authors, and the early Christians was transcendent and objective (and ultimately, the Triune God himself), and therefore implied an imperative for virtue (the individual’s and society’s subjective conformity to the objective good), the modern rejection of the ultimate metaphysical reality of the good has reduced people and their actions to a mechanistic mass. If there is no transcendent meaning to an action, there simply is no such thing as “the Good.” When the concept of teleology is discarded, it must take virtue with it. Utilitarianism, moral relativism, and the absolutizing of power are the unavoidable consequences of such a situation.
In some cases, the functional move to these bankrupt moral systems occurred much later than the metaphysical shift away from realism. But just as a person’s soul can be sick longbefore symptoms show up in the body, the West could not retain its functional transcendent vision for long.
Samuel G. Parkison until recently a pastor and professor in Kansas City, is now Associate Professor of Theological Studies and the Director of the Abu Dhabi Extension Site at Gulf Theological Seminary in the United Arab Emirates. He is the author of three books—Revelation and Response: The Why and How of Leading Corporate Worship Through Song (2018), Thinking Christianly: Bringing Sundry Thoughts Captive to Christ (2022), and Irresistible Beauty: Beholding Triune Glory in the Face of Jesus Christ (2022). He and his wife, Shannon, have three sons.
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