Regarding Honesty

i have been editing my husband's dissertation, which examines St. Thomas's account of the virtues and applies them to just war theory (he is political philosophy). on reading his account of honesty, an annex of fortitude, i was a bit awed to read that honesty is the virtue that is in relation to beauty; that is, the honest man is he who is able to apprehend what truly is beautiful.
i do not have distinct or profound meditations on this, and i do not think i need to provide you with my own. i would like to leave you with this thought and let you come to your own conclusions and have your own contemplations on it. consider how a synonym for "honesty" is "integrity," for instance. consider the meaning of "integrity"--not just moral integrity, but for a thing or being to have integrity. consider how much that is supposed to be "beautiful"--"full of beauty"--how much painting sketching drawing, how much music song rhythm, how much supposed art, lacks fundamental, basic, objective integrity. consider how modern art, in fact, seeks to glory in the deliberate destruction of integrity--of honesty--and so, therefore, by default cannot be beautiful, and therefore cannot be art.
consider how we have, now, several generations formed by this perverted media (i shall not honor it with "art"), and so we have a whole nation that has a fundamentally distorted understanding of beauty, and how we are urged to contemplate what is abhorrent and abherrent, and revel in it lest we be thought unsophisticated or intolerant. sophistry indeed . . .
and that is as far as i go. consider your own contemplations as inspired by different genres of media, even art, and respond, if you dare.

Pieper

Pieper has become a mainstay, because he says such things as this:

Music articulates the inner dynamism of man's existential self . . . but 'music' is never some impersonal, abstract energy; it is 'performed' by musicians with all their distinctive individualities . . . and since the inner growth into ethical personhood is not determined by any unchangeable law of nature but is a process shaped and threatened by countless dangers and interferences, a thousand different expressions of pretense, error, and confusion can also appear. Thus the musical articulation may include a shallow contentment with the facile availability of the cheapest 'goods', the rejection of any ordered structure, the despairing denial that man's existential becoming has a goal at all or that such a goal could be reached.

Only the Lover Sings