Many modern patterns of thought conspire against beauty. The soft utilitarianism that saturates our society tells us that beauty is just a distraction from the really useful things. Given postmodernism’s tendency to reduce all aspects of human life to the struggle for power, some proponents of “social justice” and “the hermeneutics of suspicion” are apt to see any talk of beauty as merely a means of covering up some injustice. Influencing all these positions is the Postmodern relativism that says all beauty is just in the mind of the beholder.
Unfortunately, even the church often conspires against beauty, as certain forms of Protestantism treat beauty with the suspicion that it is simply a trapdoor into idolatry. We think we are somehow guarded against the idols in our heart by surrounding ourselves with as drab and dreary an environment as possible. My fellow protestants all too often see beauty as the province, and the downfall, of the Catholic church alone.
To put it plainly, whether one rejects it as a medieval Catholic relic or as just plain useless, beauty is not modern enough for many people. And yet, as Francis Schaeffer points out, in Art and the Bible, God cares about beauty. Schaeffer sees the Lord’s instructions for the decoration of the temple as irrefutable evidence of God’s cherishing of the beautiful.[1] The Lord calls for the best craftsmen and the best materials in order to make a temple that is not only functional but also aesthetically pleasing. The instructions for the temple seem to make a point of calling out for what is certainly well beyond the pale of necessity.
Although rational, theological exposition of beauty has a long and fruitful history in Western thought, most of us first encounter beauty’s relationship to God not in an argument but rather as an argument. Mankind’s constant intuition about beauty has been that beauty points beyond itself to the divine. The twentieth century Catholic philosopher, Dietrich von Hildebrand, saw in beauty a form of God’s self-expression, at once both innately valuable and indispensable for human flourishing:
We need beauty to be well because beauty is a major form of God’s presence. As David Bentley Hart argues, this is why the Bible and Christian tradition speak of our incarnated Lord as supremely beautiful.[3]
I was blessed in college with many long, late-night conversations in the dorms, another rite of youth I sometimes fear has been endangered by the proliferation of electronic distractions. Many of these conversations, naturally, were about God and how we can know God exists. On one night I vividly remember, a good friend, usually a far more pious and orthodox Christian than was I at the time, was expressing a deep and anguished doubt of God’s existence. Such resources of traditional apologetics as I had were completely inadequate for reassuring my friend, as he was not suffering from an intellectual misgiving but rather from a lack of feeling God’s presence. Finally, my feeble intellect exhausted, I took my friend by the arm and tugged him from the room, down the hall, and out into the parking lot, where a full moon glowed voluminously over the parked cars and the leafy tops of the surrounding trees. “Look,” was the only argument I had.
It was enough. My friend, in tears and in prayer, acknowledged anew the reality of God’s nearness to us. Though the dramatic nature of this scene is due, no doubt, largely to youthful romanticism, the core of the experience has been repeated throughout human history. Beauty inevitably carries with it the sense that God is near.
Many years after that night in the dorms, I went through my own period of doubt, often struggling with my faith on the long, solitary drive to work. Ultimately, I found my faith restored in drawing near to our Lord in prayer and in reading the Scripture, but the way back to these good things seems to have been opened to me as I sat in the office parking lot and gazed at a particular tree, reddened and luminous in its October glory. I could think of scientific, materialist reasons for the tree to turn red. I could not explain, however, how it should be that the beauty of the tree should so powerfully affect me, why it should call so to my soul. Why should it matter so much to me that the tree is red? What language is this that my soul instinctively knows? The mystery of beauty points us to the deeper mystery of being. Looking at that tree, I knew that beauty is the voice of God and that the voice of God is the presence of God.
Contrary to the modern tendency to be indifferent to beauty, the great early Christian philosopher Augustine of Hippo struggled with guilt over his great susceptibility to beauty, recognizing how loving it more than God can lead us astray even while God is Himself ultimate beauty. Augustine was, of course, right to be wary of falling into idolatry. Yet, in some sense, in the young Augustine’s powerful attraction to poetry, theater, and female charm, we can see dim hints of the desire that will draw him to God, who is the the ultimate Beauty and thus the source of all that we call beautiful. Looking back on his life, Augustine says to God,
The young Augustine was no more wrong to seek beauty than he was to seek truth and goodness, but, like many of us, he failed for far too long to look through beauty to the ultimate beauty of God. He failed, for much too long, to see beauty as a language that speaks of something beyond itself. Yet, one can imagine how much worse off he would have been had he instead been utterly insensitive to all beauty. He might have avoided false gods at the price of having missed the one true God. If God was calling out to him through the beauty of creation, then Augustine’s perception of beauty was a blessing, a path home provided by God himself.
Although much has been made of Augustine’s regret for his susceptibility to beauty, we should also note the high value he places on it. Even though he roots his thought in Platonism, along with Scripture, Augustine is no Gnostic, having rejected the Manicheanism of his youth. For Augustine, the beauty of the things of this world is not a dead end. Indeed the error he regrets was in treating beauty as a stopping point, failing to hear the voice of God in beautiful things. No simple-minded ascetic, Augustine sees beauty as a form of testimony to the existence and nature of God.
I sometimes think that atheism, rather than an intellectual block, is a form of tone-deafness. After all, it cannot be just an intellectual defect, since there are so many atheists of great intelligence, so many brilliant and prominent scholars and thinkers who fail to hear the song creation sings about its Maker. I think the failure to believe is a failure to heed God’s voice in the conscience but also perhaps a failure to hear God’s voice with the aesthetic faculties.
A few pages earlier in Confessions, Augustine says something similar:
We can fail to hear the voice that is beauty, thinking, like the young Augustine before his conversion, that beautiful things speak only for and of themselves. When we do so, we fail to ask the important question, “What does beauty say to us about the nature of reality, about the truth beneath the surface of appearances?” We can look at the full moon and see only a chunk of rock in orbit, never asking ourselves why we are compelled to keep looking.
What Augustine calls “the question” that beauty provokes has been taken very seriously by the Christian intellectual tradition, beginning even before Augustine’s time. Brendan Thomas Sammon has traced how the theological approach to beauty begins, like so much in Western culture, in the synthesis of the Judeo-Christian worldview with Greco-Roman thought.[6] Sammon points out that, in the Old Testament, “beauty is deeply and profoundly bound up with God’s very being; simply put, God is beauty itself.”[7]
In the early church, this understanding of the beautiful God who says “I am” is augmented by the Greek exploration of being, or ousia, primarily through the Platonic tradition. There certainly is no one Christian understanding of beauty.[8] It is safe to say, however, that, in general, Christian thought associates beauty with God’s ultimate being. James Matthew Wilson sums up this tradition as it is manifested in the work of Jacques Maritain: “If form is the principle of being of any and every thing, and if it is form that constitutes beauty, then beauty must be convertible with being: every thing, insofar as it has being, must have to that extent beauty. Along with unity, goodness, and truth, beauty must be one of the transcendental properties of being – and, as God is being Itself, so these properties must name God.”[9] For the Christian, then, beauty is something more than mere pleasantness or even loveliness. It is a way in which the infinite God makes Himself known to us.
In his book The Beauty of the Infinite, David Bentley Hart explains how the Christian understanding of beauty stands counter to both pagan and modern/postmodern forms of nihilism that would leave the infinite at an un-crossable distance from us. In a gratuity born out of the loving nature of the Trinity, God comes to us in beauty: “God’s gracious action in creation belongs from the first to that delight, pleasure, and regard that the Trinity enjoys from eternity, as an outward and unnecessary expression of that love; and thus creation must be received before all else as gift and beauty.”[10] Beauty is a picture of grace, grace’s very mirror. It comes unasked for and undeserved to lift us out of ourselves and above our petty concerns. It is, however, also like grace in that it can be resisted. We can harden our hearts to it. One thing good poetry can do is teach us to respond to beauty.
Footnotes:
[1] Schaeffer, Art and the Bible (Intervarsity, 2006), 26.
[2] von Hildebrand, Aesthetics (Vol. 1. Translated by Fr. Brian McNeil. Edited by. John F. The Hildebrand Project, 2016), 2–3.
[3] Hart, Beauty of the Infinite (Eerdmans, 2003).
[4] Augustine, Confessions, (Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford University Press, 1992), 201.
[5] Augustine, Confessions, 184.
[6] Sammon, Called to Attraction: An Introduction to the Theology of Beauty. (Cascade, 2017).
[7] Sammon, Called to Attraction, 16.
[8] for a sense of the complexity see, in addition to Sammon, Umberto Eco’s Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (Translated by Hugh Bredin. Yale University Press, 1986).
[9] Wilson, The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition (The Catholic University of America Press, 2017), 194.
[10] Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 249.
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