Have you ever read a commentary on or contemplated the relationship between the three powers of the soul and the three transcendent categories of truth, goodness, and beauty? Would love to hear your insights
Yassou Iakovo! The issue with that triad of transcendentals is their highly compromised philosophical origins. They don't exist as a triad in the ancient Greeks or even the Scholastics, but only develop as such in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as Enlightenment–era thinkers tried to account for taste (and hence beauty came to be elevated to the level of goodness and truth). There's a highly interesting article on the topic by John Levi Martin called "The Birth of The True, The Good, and The Beautiful" which you can read here:
I would not call it edifying, but it is educational. The wonder of it is how this triadic idea of truth, goodness, and beauty, with all its sullied history, can be turned around and made into such an effective tool for expressing an Orthodox worldview, such as Patitsas has done. You can find in _The Ethics of Beauty_ bits and pieces about how the transcendentals can be thought to correspond with the tripartite soul, but to be clear, this is creative work Patitsas is doing. And it would be creative work on my part to attempt to develop the same.
Thank you Cormac!
Have you ever read a commentary on or contemplated the relationship between the three powers of the soul and the three transcendent categories of truth, goodness, and beauty? Would love to hear your insights
Yassou Iakovo! The issue with that triad of transcendentals is their highly compromised philosophical origins. They don't exist as a triad in the ancient Greeks or even the Scholastics, but only develop as such in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as Enlightenment–era thinkers tried to account for taste (and hence beauty came to be elevated to the level of goodness and truth). There's a highly interesting article on the topic by John Levi Martin called "The Birth of The True, The Good, and The Beautiful" which you can read here:
https://home.uchicago.edu/~jlmartin/Papers/The%20Birth%20of%20the%20True,%20the%20Good,%20and%20the%20Beautiful.pdf
I would not call it edifying, but it is educational. The wonder of it is how this triadic idea of truth, goodness, and beauty, with all its sullied history, can be turned around and made into such an effective tool for expressing an Orthodox worldview, such as Patitsas has done. You can find in _The Ethics of Beauty_ bits and pieces about how the transcendentals can be thought to correspond with the tripartite soul, but to be clear, this is creative work Patitsas is doing. And it would be creative work on my part to attempt to develop the same.