Scriptorium Daily
If beauty does exist, then there might be disciplines, learning traditions, which can teach humanity about this aspect of reality. Just as science studies physical truths, it could be that art, poetry, literature, and music describe (in their own terms) aspects of Beauty. Real beauty opens the possibility of taking fairy tales seriously without thinking them “true” in a scientific sense.
What is the reality behind the Cinderella? It turns out that fairy tales are trustworthy guides to reality and what is in popular entertainment has ruined modern vision. The unchanging world in which humans were created resonates with the fairy tales which get at Beauty through the tool of fiction. Fairy tales correspond closely enough to God’s real world that humans created in the image of God can be lead through them to truth. Such myths act as sign-posts to one aspect of his great and complex creation. The stories scientists tell are accurate in different ways and point to different aspects of reality, but both science and fairy tales are incomplete pictures of one great whole.
There is at least as much good description of reality in Lord of the Rings, Hamlet, and Harry Potter as there is in most social studies textbooks. The history text speaks of the Prince of Denmark who lived in space and time. It uses one set of tools to find one aspect of reality: historic truth. The play Hamlet does not speak of this prince, but of an image of that prince created by Shakespeare. This image does not teach the history of Denmark, but about problems a man faces, and does this analysis beautifully. Since men posses both immaterial souls and physical bodies and the cosmos contains spirits and material objects, the whole truth about men and nature must contain a space-time description of what bodies have done and what souls have done. Feelings and beauty are real.
This is the reason the traditional college or university demanded a thorough grounding in both the arts and sciences. Human knowledge is incomplete and fallen. In Utopia, perfect knowledge of a single particle of water could be used to infer the ocean, physics, the pleasure of hearing waves crashing on a beach, and the fears of Odysseus lost on the great wine-dark sea, but Utopia is no place where humans live.
There are not two truths: physical and spiritual. It is simply that there are many ways to come to the one knowable truth for limited human beings. Science works well in coming to one aspect of that reality and poetry is good at another. Simple-minded folk try to reduce everything to what can be shown by one or the other means.
