Richard Doster. Submitted
Plato and Aristotle both believed that truth, goodness, and beauty conveyed divine meaning to the human soul. Truth, they believed, defined reality. Goodness described that which fulfilled its purpose. And beauty expressed “whatever is lovely.”
By the fifth century, when Christianity was established in the Western world, Christian theologians came to see these as features of God’s general revelation; they were intrinsic to his nature of character, which meant that God didn’t merely possess truth, goodness, and beauty; he was truth, goodness and beauty — and they were everywhere in the world he made. What’s more, they were objective, not subjective, and could always be found by “the noble seeker.”
In time, of course, secular culture came to see truth and goodness as relative. We were free to define our own truths and our sense of good and evil. Beauty, too, became a matter of “mere passion and sensibility,” said theologian Edward Farley. It no longer corresponded with a reality beyond itself; beauty merely “reflected a subjective sensibility.” In other words, it was in the eye of the beholder and nothing more.
Perhaps now — as our world grows uglier, coarser, and angrier — there’s reason to rethink the proper work of beauty. If we see it rightly and employ it wisely, beauty might be our way back to goodness and truth.
At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be any practical or utilitarian reason for beauty. The sunrise, for example, doesn’t need to showcase a multitude of colors that stretch the width of the whole horizon — that’s a gift of pure grace. It not only gives us pleasure, says poet Lucy Shaw, it makes us more alive, more aware, and more connected to the world God made.
When we’re in the presence of beauty, we always respond in delight, said philosopher Eugene Peterson. We want to be immersed in it. We’re eager to come near, to enter in. “We can’t help but tap our feet, hum along, touch, kiss, believe, pray … .” It draws us further and further into whatever’s there: scent, rhythm, texture, vision. It’s then that we know beauty is more than skin deep, that it is, in fact, in the eye of every beholder, and always reveals goodness and truth.
Beauty, Peterson said, “releases light into our awareness so that we’re conscious of the beauty of the Lord.”
That’s why we love to create beautiful things: a scarf, a portrait, a story or song. With such work, Shaw believes, we form a bond with God; one that springs from the reality that “God was the first quilter (of prairies), the primal painter (night skies, snow on cedars), the archetypal metal Sculptor (mountain ranges, icebergs), the Composer who heard the whales’ strange, sonorous clickings and songs in his headlong before there were whales to sound them, the Playwright who plotted the sweeping drama of Creation, Incarnation, Redemption, the Poet whose Word said it all.”
We see how beauty begets more beauty. It prompts the creation of new things, says Kate Harrison Brennan, chief officer of Anglican Deaconess Ministries in Australia. “We hear beautiful poetry, and we’re stirred to put pen to paper, to take an idea deeper and further; thus, new poems are born. We hear a new melody and something inside begins to stir; we become aware of something different, something more, something that’s never before been known. Beauty may then be considered objective,” Brennan says. “[It’s] something we experience that is independent of individual, subjective taste, something that when encountered raises our eyes above the material world.”
And so, to show indifference to beauty is to neglect its Creator, says Shaw. It is to disregard the fingerprints of God on the natural world, “and in human beings who reflect his image.”
To be indifferent to beauty is to miss its point and purpose. “Why else would [God] shape and color fish, birds, insects, plants, and people with such rich diversity?” Shaw asks. She quotes her friend Elizabeth Rooney, who said, “Imagine making something as useful as a tree, as efficient at converting sunlight into food and fuel, as huge and tough as a white oak that lives 300 years, and then decorating it in spring with tiny pink leaves and pale green tassels of blossoms.”
The writer Annie Dillard understood. “We are here to witness and abet creation,” she said, “… to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together, we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach, but we notice each others beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.”
And so that we can, together, marvel at the truth and goodness of God.
Richard Doster lives in Fernandina Beach with his wife Sally. He’s the founding editor of byFaith, the magazine of the Presbyterian Church in America. Reach him at doster.richard@gmail.com