Telos (End/Ultimate Purpose)
“The “Good” is a term that ultimately applies to God. God is good and the source of all goodness. Indeed, goodness has a place in the “philosophical trinity.” That trinity is truth, goodness, and beauty. These are the three properties of being. God alone has true being. Everything that exists does so because God gives it being. Creation thus has relative being. The purpose (telos) of all created things is to move from relative being towards greater likeness and union with God in the truth of His being. In theological terms, we speak of this as “eternal life”…the truth of anything is found not in the present, but in its telos, its end. A seed is not known until it is a tree. But, most importantly, this realization of the truth is not seen as a gradual progression, a building up towards the truth. Such a scheme would suggest that the truth is “not yet.” The truth, however, is already and now. We can say that the truth, which already exists in the age to come, draws everything towards itself. Or, we can say that the truth, which already exists in the age to come, manifests itself in time even now, for those who have the eyes to see.” (Father Stephen Freeman)
“Modernity has been loath to accept the idea that the telos of a thing is inherent in its nature. Francis Bacon, in his Novum Organum (1620), was particularly disdainful of final causality. In defense of experimental science, he insisted that we ought to begin with the objects as we have them in front of us and as we access them with the senses. He rejected out of hand, therefore, the notion that ends belong to the nature of things.” (Hans Boersma)
“Human nature needed the divine life to re-enliven it, for God again to breathe life into the nostrils of men and women [Genesis 2:7]. Only in this way could He actually heal human nature (save) so we could begin flourishing according to our proper telos [end]. And this, according to Jesus, was exactly what was happening through His ministry. By descending into death, Jesus lifted those who were perishing out of death. Jesus defeated the death principle through reuniting human nature to the divine. As St. Ephrem the Syrian (circa 306–373) said in one of his Nativity hymns, “Today the Deity imprinted itself on humanity, / so that humanity might also be cut into the seal of Deity.” (Robin Phillips)
“ In Matthew 5:48, Christ bids His disciples to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect”. The word here rendered “perfect” is teleios, which means not so much “sinless” as “mature, having reached one’s telos or goal”. That is, Christ bids us grow up to be like our heavenly Father in every way. When Luke shares this counsel in his Gospel, he translates Christ as saying, “Be compassionate [Greek oiktirmos], even as your Father is compassionate” (Luke 6:36). The perfection and maturity for which we must strive can summarily described as consisting of mercy. Mercy and compassion lay at the heart of the Christian life, and without mercy, no one can call Himself a Christian.” (Fr. Lawrence Farley)
“Especially in Christendom…there was a unique tension between “self-¬transcendence” — a “turning of life towards something beyond ordinary human flourishing” — and the this-¬worldly concerns of human flourishing and creaturely existence. We might redescribe this as a tension between what “eternity” required and what the mundane vagaries of domestic life demanded. It was assumed that human life found its ultimate meaning and telos in a transcendent eternity and that the demands of securing such an ultimate life required a certain ascetic relation to the pleasures and demands of mundane, domestic life.” (Charles Taylor, James K.A. Smith)
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