Moral Majesty, Spiritual Splendor

A Christian Handbook of Human Basics

Clark Elder Morrow

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781725298460, 9781725298477
• eBook ISBN: 9781725298484
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Do you really know the difference between shame and guilt? Could you spell out what makes envy very much a separate emotion from jealousy? And what exactly differentiates self-respect from self-esteem? This concise handbook takes you on an entertaining voyage of exploration through many basic human attitudes and attributes, all the while pointing out the poetic and practical facets of things like "Nobility and Ignobility, " or "Virtue and Virility." Drawing on the wisdom of history's greatest thinkers, but looking at it all from a Judeo-Christian perspective, this handy and witty manual will open your eyes to the defining characteristics of such pairs as pride and vanity, and equality and equity, as well as what makes them so arrestingly unique. Indispensable as a brief "field guide" to the deepest dimensions of the human experience, and delightful in its stylish delivery, Moral Majesty, Spiritual Splendor will show you the moral fundamentals of what we all experience in our daily lives, from a classically informed Christian viewpoint.

chapter 1

Good and Bad

Good is the most difficult thing in the world to explain. Try it and you’ll see what I mean. It is so difficult to describe because it is the biggest, most obvious thing there is. And the most prevalent and fundamental of all principles or axioms is always the hardest to conceive of. The hardest thing for a fish to describe would be water. Good is the house in which we live, the background behind everything you see, the air we breathe, the atmosphere in which we do all we do, the cosmos that envelops us, and the underlying “substance” out of which all things emerge and have their being. It is the ambient “white noise” behind creation, and the lingering radiation that is the most elemental holdover from the Big Bang of God’s original Fiat. No wonder it is almost impossible to explain.

Actors often say that they like to play villains because it’s so interesting to be bad on screen or on stage, but I think it’s much more of a challenge to portray genuine goodness. That is why there are so few convincing and memorable depictions of goodness on film: one thinks of Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, of course, and there are a couple of roles by Gary Cooper that would qualify, but on the whole they are rare. Great villains, on the other hand, are much more prevalent, and stand out in our memories more forcefully. That is because it is easier to be quite bad—all you have to do is exaggerate some good quality until it becomes disastrous (for you and for everyone around you—but more on that in a moment).

The fact that evil is so quickly accessible is not strange, given that Good is the most basic of all facts. It’s easy to deviate from a norm, to smudge a big white canvas. Good precedes all other facts. First there was Good, and then there was everything else. It underlies all else, and gives to everything whatever meaning those other things have. It’s the background against which each thing, and every person, is placed and “painted.” That being the case, you can see how easy it is to stand out by right of an ‘exaggeration’ or deprivation (bad is always some sort of lack or want—we exaggerate to make up for a real or perceived insufficiency). Good is the primary fact, the most primary of all first facts, and if we were able to go to the heart of the universe, and peer into the innermost chamber of existence, we would see Goodness at work.

But what kind of work would he be doing? (I say “he” because we should always resist the urge to de-personalize reality—reality is derived from a Person, and bears the marks of personality in every fiber.) Well, he is busy turning bad into good, like Rumpelstilsken in the fairy tale, who spun straw into gold. (There is much spiritual wisdom in fairy tales, which I hope to point out as we go along.) Goodness turns bad into good. That is one of the many reasons why good is good. Good came before all else, and it will outlast everything else. If you paint a picture on a white canvas, it will have a different “tone” than the exact same picture painted on a black canvas. This universe is painted on a white canvas, as it were, and that tone permeates the objects and truths—seen and unseen—that surround us. Good is more multifaceted than evil because it is more prior in nature, more pre-existent, more constitutive than evil. It is the original from which evil is merely the derivative. That particular point has been made many times before, and by writers better equipped to make it than I am, but we should consider it here at the outset in order to properly “set the stage” for all that will follow.

What do I mean when I say that Goodness gives meaning to everything else? It does so like this: whatever you see, whatever you touch, whatever you love or endure or deal with, is either good or bad, and bad is simply a defacing and a marring and a degrading of something that is good. But we’ll deal with Bad very soon.

There are two ways in which something (or someone) can be good.

It can be beautiful, useful, radiant, admirable, lovely, and impressive; or it can do good, and be morally outstanding. Things can be useful without being morally good—for example, a sword in the hands of a bad man. But usefulness is generally speaking an impressive thing, whether you are good or bad.

Now we usually think of moral goodness when we think of goodness, but let’s consider the other kind first. This is what we’ll call ‘magnificence”—the kind of good that is good to behold, that seems to radiate a wonder and a glowing value beyond itself, whether it does anything praiseworthy or not. We want to praise it for reasons we do not know. That is what the book of Genesis has in mind when it depicts God beholding the objects he has created and calling them “good.” He doesn’t mean they are good in the sense that they are moral—he means they are beautiful, substantial, magnificent, with a worth and transcendence that is admirable in and of itself. And that is still how we feel about these things when we study them—when we watch, for example, a giraffe gliding gracefully along, or a mountain range glowing pinkish in a vast silent sunset. We see and know instinctively that these things—and most others—are good.

Think of a large saltwater lake or sea in which there is absolutely nothing. Then think of a large lake in which there is a dolphin. The second lake is better than the first lake. Why? Because there is a dolphin in it! (To a child this is obvious.) But how does that make it better? Because there is something good about a dolphin being anywhere. We approve of dolphins. Why? Because we like them. Why? Because there’s something about them that is better than mere nothingness. Dolphins in the world are better than no dolphins in the world, and this has to do with something in them—something that they either have or are. Dolphins are good in and of themselves. They present to the world something (or many things) we can approve of. We need a word that is something like beautiful and lovable and glowing and delightful and divine all mixed up together. That word is good (in its very first meaning). It includes the idea that something is better than nothing, that just to be is good. That is what we mean by ‘magnificence’. A ballerina’s performance may be neither charitable nor utilitarian, but it will certainly be (if graceful and pleasing) good in this specific sense.

But of course there is more to goodness than that, whether the good is ‘magnificent’ or moral. There is a warm, glowing, heartfelt, pleasurable feeling that is good in and of itself. The Good produces a good feeling inside us. Good produces good, as we would expect. But there is more to good than even that (that’s how good Good is).

For instance, why do you think it is that so many of us cry when we come unexpectedly face to face with extraordinary moral goodness? Why should that be? I will make the guess that we cry because the recognition of goodness involves a sort of homecoming in miniature. The moment of seeing Good gives us a strong and immediate taste of something we have known all our lives—it calls back to our minds what we know in a very buried sense. Do you remember what I was saying about good being the background and forerunner to everything else? Most of the time we are completely unaware of that fact—or at least we do not have that fact foremost in our minds. But when real goodness hits us in the face and makes us cry, we are reminded that it was there all along, behind the scenery, behind the fabric of our world, lurking in the depths of day-to-day life. It grabs us by the lapels and forces us to acknowledge, tearfully, the fact that Good is what made us, and makes us what we are, and makes everything we love, and makes everything we love essentially the way it is. We break down and admit, with tears in our eyes, that Good produces the flesh and the spirit that make up our loved ones, and the food that they eat, and the things that protect them. Good is everything except those few things that threaten what we love. God is not only love, he is the Good as well, which means that absolutely every conceivable thing in your life that makes life good is from him, and is his invention. The riverbank, the huge variety of foods we enjoy, the crisp tang of a cold breeze on an autumn evening, your music collection, the eyes of your daughter, the way your dog sits when he seems puzzled by your actions, a boat rocking in slapping little waves at dawn—everything comes from him, and is his idea. Some human being may have built the boat, or made the music, but the goodness in them that makes you relish and remember them—this comes from him, and is his.

Make a list of your favorite things—things you consider undeniably good. Things that no one could ever say are bad. If you do, you’ll find yourself listing things that are comforting and reassuring and pleasant: things like crackling oaky fires under the mantle on a frosty evening; like fragrant pies and soups fresh from the kitchen as newly-arrived family-members chat happily and laugh and step into the dining-room; like warm breezy hilltops on late spring days, tempting you to roll down them like a child; things like a three-year-old girl talking to you and then suddenly, for no reason, hugging you. When you amass all these things and study—or rather, feel—what they have in common, you begin to realize that these phenomena have the scent of a symbol about them. True, they are very sensual, and rich in pleasant stimulants and tactile memories, but they cannot shake off the halo of something symbolic. They are more than what they appear to be. They mean more than they seem to mean. There is a richness and a life to them that transcend the borders of the objects in them, and exceed their brief durations. This I think is what Keats meant when he said, “All is allegory.”

Isn’t it true that what we respond to in those lovely vignettes is the fact that they emphasize and underline life? That all their touching and robust details contribute to life, and feed it heartily and wholesomely? Love and sustenance are the key ingredients of these scenes. Love and sustenance—because love always wants to feed and protect. Speaking in very general terms, men feel an impulse to protect and women feel an impulse to feed, though of course good men and women do both. The conviviality and high spirits and warm sentiments of the scenes described above show us love; the food and fire and cozy wainscoted walls of dens and dining-rooms show us protection and sustenance; the warm breezes and blue skies and white clouds and hills inviting us to roll down them, all show us health and freedom and exuberance. But that last element—the desire to roll down hills—introduces the hint of something else: something like the surge of exhilaration you would feel if you could suddenly soar up through the sky like a missile, with an absolute assurance of safety. It’s freedom and expansion and seeing everything instantaneously and with breathless excitement. It is wisdom acquired with speed and boundlessness. This sort of goodness is a sort of godhood, though—once again—it does not inhere in us aboriginally, but flows from God.

We have identified love and sustenance and freedom and a sort of contented omniscience (as when we seem to see a kindly Big Picture behind everything) as the hallmarks of our favorite times. What do all those elements tell us, if anything? Here is one clue: oddly enough, it’s when I am confronted with a moment of unforeseen bliss that I sense the symbolic nature of the moment most strongly. And in those moments I sense that what I am experiencing is a greater nearness to God. I feel that all the attributes of the scene are simply marks or signs that are living and vibrant because they are revealing God to me. The foods and the smells and the smoke and the warmth and the embraces and the stars through frosty windows and the fresh breezy hillsides are all very palpable symbols of a very impalpable God. Anything good in itself is good because it is not only from him, but because it points to him. (After all, bad but enjoyable things—fun but destructive things—are ultimately from God, too, in a very roundabout way, but because they do not lead to him, they are, in the final analysis, harmful and frustrating.) And anything good is good because of its nature as a signpost—a signpost fashioned by the master carpenter’s hand, and bearing his glowing light as a sort of lingering ghostly signature. Nothing is good that does not point in his direction, and nothing is good that does not preserve a notable degree of its own original purity.

What do I mean by purity in this respect? When I was thinking about dessert last night, before drifting off to sleep, it was borne in upon me with surprising force that a perfect dessert would be one that was as simple as possible: a few large pieces of fresh fruit, and a few slices of perfectly-crafted cheese. I felt the truth of this conviction strongly, and I became intensely aware—in my imagination—of the purity of the items in my vision: the fruit and the cheese. I saw them standing naked on a plate, beaming forth nothing but their fruitiness and their cheesiness, and the more I did so the more intense those qualities became, until I was mesmerized by the sheer power and passion (as it were) of the very atoms constituting these items. That is what I mean by purity: the essential whatness of the thing in question, in all its naked glory. Insofar as an item retains that singular absoluteness, or unity of composition, it retains its original status as “good”—as in: “God saw what he had created, and saw that it was good.” Things may get all mixed up with one another later, but when they stand forth in their primeval purity, as radiant and unadulterated as on the day they were formed, then we see how beautiful the great Types are when fresh from the hand of their Maker.

But let’s not stray too far from our most important point. It is a fundamental intuition of our species that all good things—genuinely good things—are good because they give us a glimpse or a sensation of Nearness to God...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Good and Bad
• Chapter 2: Love and Hate
• Chapter 3: Pride and Vanity
• Chapter 4: Justice and Injustice
• Chapter 5: Natural and Supernatural
• Chapter 6: Shame and Guilt
• Chapter 7: Envy and Jealousy
• Chapter 8: Virtue and Virility
• Chapter 9: Life and Death
• Chapter 10: Self-Esteem and Self-Respect
• Chapter 11: Nobility and Ignobility
• Chapter 12: Tolerance and Judgment
• Chapter 13: Liberty and License
• Afterword
• Bibliography