Most virtues are means between extremes that are actually creative choices.

"The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty." ~Albert Einstein

THE Truth, the Beautiful, and the Good — through all the ages of man's conscious evolution these words have expressed three great ideals: ideals which have instinctively been recognized as representing the sublime nature and lofty goal of all human endeavour. In epochs earlier than our own there was a deeper knowledge of man's being and his connection with the universe, when Truth, Beauty and Goodness had more concrete reality than they have in our age of abstraction. Let us try


to understand how Truth, Beauty and Goodness are related, as concrete realities, to the being of man.

Most virtues are means between extremes that are actually creative choices. Courage, for example, is the middle way between foolhardiness and cowardice, but this will be a unique and distinctive path for each person. Gandhi's courage in confronting the British had a quality and personal style different from any soldier in battle or any other person who stands firm in the face of danger.

Gandhi observed that although Socrates was not considered handsome, "to my mind he was beautiful because all his life was striving after truth." Some have said that Gandhi was just as ugly as Socrates, yet one friend said that "there was a rare spiritual beauty that shone in his face." Gandhi's moral beauty came from the courage of being true to himself and being true to others. Moral beauty appears in lives that unite goodness and truth. Moral beauty is an exceptional and very striking phenomenon. . . . Much more than science, art and religion, moral beauty is the basis of civilization. The question is what kind of beauty?

The external beauty of many celebrities may blind us to the fact that they may be too proud and self-conscious about the attractive facades they have created. True moral beauty is never showy and ostentatious; if it is, it is false and only a semblance of virtue. One can imagine even the most crippled and deformed presenting themselves with elegance and dignity. We have had luminaries like Helen Keller who have inspired generations of people with disabilities to live life to the fullest. People like her are the most beautiful souls who have walked and lived on this planet. Such beautiful people are cynosure for a great majority of people.

Virtue ethics is emulative--using the sage or saint as a model for virtue--whereas rule ethics is based on simple conformity and obedience. The emulative approach engages the imagination, personalizes, and thoroughly grounds individual moral action and responsibility. Such an ethics naturally lends itself to aesthetics of virtue: the crafting of a good and beautiful soul, a unique individual gem among other gems and in doing so love God all the more.

Truth is the origin of moral values; goodness is an orderly and harmonious mechanism to safeguard the moral values; beauty is the harmony, proportion, collocation and symmetry of the moral values to our lives. The combination of the universe is the combination of truth, goodness and beauty without which there will be no universe.

Some might ask, isn’t there also beauty in the grotesque? Disharmony, asymmetry, atrophy in both nature, the universe, as well as man can be quite beautiful. I prefer to think, beauty lies in the heart and mind of the beholder who sees the harmonious relation between truth, goodness and beauty, and it is that appreciation of beauty which many cannot see but only the divinely and spiritually inclined. It was, indeed, out of a profound instinct that Truth, Beauty and Goodness were held to be the greatest ideals for mankind!