Beauteous Truth

Beauteous Truth: Faith, Reason, Literature, and Culture by Joseph Pearce, 320 pages

Beauteous Truth  is a collection of blog posts, book reviews, book introductions, interviews, and magazine essays, on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from history to philosophy to aesthetics to autobiography.  Author Pearce has written literary biographies of Solzehnitsyn, Tolkien, Lewis, Belloc, Wilde, Shakespeare, and Chesterton, focusing on the influence of Christianity generally, and Catholicism specifically, upon his subjects, so it is no surprise that questions about the relationship between Truth and Beauty, between faith and art, form the dominant theme.

Pearce directly targets both the modern notion of a war between faith and reason and the academic aversion to matters of morality and religion.  Following Dawson and Eliot he sees these as antithetical to the survival of culture and civilization.  The loftiness of his cause inspires a determination and combativeness that can come across as overly forceful, which is only aggravated by the inevitably somewhat repetitive (but certain things are worth repeating) nature of such a collection.  This is balanced somewhat by the structure of the book, which provides a certain thematic progression despite the components not having been initially conceived as part of a greater whole.  There is an occasional minor misstep (Weston was a renegade spiritualist in Perelandra, not a materialist as he was in Out of the Silent Planet), but on the whole Pearce's passionate arguments are strong. clear, and insightful.