OF GOODNESS
„And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.“ With these words, Chapter I of Genesis comes to a close, assuring us that the labors of God over the first six days of The Creation were of a quality taken so lightly in the present day that the word used to describe it is among the most depreciated in our entire language: good.
Yet, this being the one and only adjective used to evaluate the labors of God in creating the universe, it strikes me that‑‑ our debasement and devaluation of it notwithstanding‑‑ there must be something awesomely meaningful to the word. For‑‑ when we „translate“ the term from an adjective (good) into a quality (goodness) ‑‑ the chaff quickly falls from the wheat and the heft of the word’s actual weight suddenly dangles unmistakeably before us, as if someone had suddenly called out at a Sunday church service for volunteers to sacrifice their lives for what they believed in.
For, though the „good“ may be everywhere (as in gooddays, goodbooks, goodladies, goodweather, goodcurrency, goodfood, goodsex, goodnews and goodheavens), goodness itself‑‑ being an aggregate of beauty, character, spirituality and moral perfection, to mention only a few‑‑ makes terrifying and almost unattainable demands upon those who would be its bearers, as it asks of us that we incorporate what, in isolation, are merely qualities into a condition. So that recently, when an acquaintance of mine said of the poet, essayist and farmer Wendell Berry that „Wendell is that rarest of living things‑‑ a good man,“ it was not our conventional idea of the good as merely an aggregate of qualities that he was speaking of, but the Biblical notion of goodness itself: „And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.“
The key here is the word „every.“ For, in order to qualify for the epithet „good,“ we must first be assured that the wholeof what God has made is good. For true goodness‑‑ that is, a goodness deserving of God’s own imprimatur‑‑ knows nothing of the piecemeal, the isolated, the partial. It is why, to quote Flannery O’Connor (whose writerly skill and Catholicity both would have kept her from using the word lightly), „A Good Man is Hard to Find“‑‑ and why one would want to take great pause before even auditioning for the title.
Far easier, for most of us, to bear the partial and human weight of the adjective than to ask of ourselves (though ask, perhaps, we must) that we become carriers of the noun … with its great burden of coherence, its God‑like and terrifying echoes.