Today Julie reviewed a book called The Church Building as a Sacred Place; y’all can go read her review, because I’m not going to talk about it as such.

But she talks about the importance of beautiful churches, which triggered some reflections.

According to St. Thomas Aquinas, all of the transcendentals (the True, the Good, the Beautiful) are all essentially the same thing, which is to say God, the ground of all Being. (Bear with me here.) Me, I’m a programmer; I juggle thoughts for a living. I came back to the Catholic Church because I determined that it was True, and since then I’ve very much approached God along that axis.

In the introduction to Ratzinger’s Faith, Tracy Rowland notes that Pope Benedict thought that the neo-Scholastics who dominated pre-Vatical II Catholic theology were too focused on the intellect; and while not thinking them wrong, always chose to emphasize God as Love, as the perfectly loving and the ultimately lovable.

So here’s the thought I had. We cannot, in our human fraily, truly understand God. And though we can know that the True, the Good, and the Beautiful are all one thing, are all God underneath, nevertheless they are different to us. And so it seems to me that as Christians, to approach God, to know him as best we can and love him as best we can, we have to approach him along all three axes.

(Obvious, perhaps, but I still need to hear it.)