ALVAREZ: How beauty, goodness and truth can evangelize and catechize

According to Bishop Robert Barron of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester and founder of Word on Fire, most people can be a bit resistant or defensive when they are being evangelized or maybe even perhaps catechized. He recommends starting not with the truth but rather the beautiful, then moving on to the good and, lastly, the truth, so we avoid misleading others.  

In his book, “To Light a Fire on the Earth,” Bishop Barron talks about his upbringing and takes us back to his early childhood memories of what he describes as a beautiful encounter. Precisely during his teenage years, he found himself captivated by Aquinas’s arguments for the existence of God, which opened up a spiritual journey for him. “I think it was a movement of grace… wow, that’s right, that’s correct, no one up to that point in my experience really had thought seriously about God, you just went to Mass” (Ch. 3).  

Bishop Barron continues to elaborate on his first experience with beauty through the exposure of Aquinas’s clarity and realization that he could directly go to the source and ask to know more about God. The first transcendental we find is beauty, and we can describe it as the recommended approach to start with when evangelizing and catechizing.   

Peter Kreeft, an American professor of philosophy at Boston College and The King’s College, provides a wonderful understanding of the uniqueness of each universal property of all reality or transcendental by modes that include God’s attributes of His nature to us in “C.S. Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty,” a collection of essays reflecting on Lewis. 

“God revealed these three attributes of His nature to all humankind: truth especially through the philosophers, good especially through the prophets and moralists, and beauty through the poets, artists, musicians and mythmakers,” Kreeft wrote.  

This takes us into the second transcendental of goodness, which Kreeft describes in detail as the next component after beauty. After that, which we have experienced with beauty, we now have an opportunity to respond to goodness, and he vouched for Lewis as a great example since Augustine. Although the transcendental of goodness comes from beauty, we have goodness that is interconnected and dependent upon truth. 

Kreeft looks at the holiness in the saints as another example of goodness, “Goodness means ultimate Christ Himself, the most beautiful sight human eyes have ever beheld” (Kreeft, 34). Once the beauty has been presented, then we reach the ultimate good Himself, the Word of God, who is Jesus Christ, and once we have active participation, we move on to understanding truth. 

In the final transcendental, we reach truth. We get a beautiful encounter by Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium, “Every expression of true beauty can thus be acknowledged as a path leading to an encounter with the Lord Jesus… a renewed esteem for beauty as a means of touching the human heart and enabling the truth and goodness of the risen Christ to radiate within it” (EG, 167). We become attracted to the beauty of God first and then realize we want to know Jesus and ultimately come into a relationship with Him through these transcendentals. 

This approach not only gives us a great way to invite others when evangelizing but also approaches catechesis nicely and easily rather than hammering down on the dos and don’ts and taking the chance of oppositional defiance. Rather, we take on a sensitive approach to reaching the human heart in a majestic way, which these three teachers have defined for us, and ultimately, we understand truth as being Christ Jesus; He is the truth, the way back to God. 

As a result, we consider starting with the transcendentals in the order of beauty, opening goodness and encountering truth to ultimately reach God. As we journey through this process, we learn to take on a sensitive approach of invitation rather than imposing onto a relativistic culture something more head-on. To effectively evangelize and catechize the many, this approachable formula focuses on the beauty and good of Jesus to reach a true understanding of the truth, reaching the human heart in a creative and attractive way. †