Beauty: A True Human Need
As I write, on the day celebrated by some Orthodox as the feast of the Transfiguration on the Julian calendar, I’ve had several experiences of beauty just this morning. The sunrise through the West Virginia trees, the sunlight streaming into an Orthodox monastery church and illuminating the rising incense smoke around the icons, the chant, the memory of the faces of those I love, on and on.
While I drove across the country this summer, I imagined, or at least hoped, that I was more aware of and attentive to the beauty surrounding me than I had been on similar voyages earlier in my life. This may have stemmed from my grandly calling the trip a “pilgrimage,” and trying to travel accordingly.
The Transfiguration may be the most beautiful moment in recorded history. Peter, James, and John were mortal sinners chosen to witness the fullness of beauty: Christ as God alongside two great prophets. The pleasure that God the Father spoke of at that moment is the pleasure of the source of all beauty.
But for all that, beauty remains a mystery to me. I’ve always thought that I don’t “do beauty” well.
It’s a confusing subject. “There’s no accounting for taste,” we’re told, suggesting that beauty “is in the eye of the beholder.” These clichés surely carry some truth. But just dismissing beauty as an entirely subjective matter is inadequate to explain it, or to explain the need we feel to share it with others.
Some writers have identified “real beauty” with human faces or bodies, or particular examples of art and architecture. I think these efforts are as confused as I am. But they too are looking for the “what is” of real beauty.
One great help towards sorting out the confusion is a book by the late English philosopher Roger Scruton, Beauty (also published under the title, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction).
Scruton rejects the notion that beauty is simply a subjective experience, though subjectivity is very much involved. Taking an explicitly incarnational view of the body, he claims that “human beauty belongs to our embodiment, and art that ‘objectifies’ the body, removing it from the realm of moral relations, can never capture the true beauty of the human form.”
Beauty is inextricably linked to goodness, and so to moral matters.
The book is an example of one of my favorite “genres,” works by philosophers and theologians who no longer need to write competitively or academically. These writers are on the far side of much thought, scholarship, or prayer – or possibly all three. The books are brief and simple, presenting settled conclusions. They tend towards wisdom (Pope Benedict XVI’s short trilogy on Jesus of Nazareth is another example).
Scruton finds some understanding in the classical notion of beauty, along with truth and goodness, as a Platonic reality that transcends time and space. But it is more than that, just as it is more than whatever I happen to say it is. There’s an objective reality to which the person responds subjectively in some way:
The experience of beauty. . .is rationally founded. It challenges us to find meaning in its object, to make critical comparisons, and to examine our own lives and emotions in the light of what we find. Art, nature and the human form all invite us to place this experience in the centre of our lives. If we do so, then it offers a place of refreshment of which we will never tire. But to imagine we can do this, and still be free to see beauty as nothing more than a subjective preference, is to misunderstand the depth to which reason and value penetrate our lives. It is to fail to see that, for a free being, there is right feeling, right experience and right enjoyment as much as right action.
Scruton does not say what I would add (though he is not irreligious). But I think his short book points to beauty (and truth and goodness) not just as absolutes in themselves, but as a right relationship with God, the absolute. We are rational and relational creatures, and beauty reflects our desire to be in the right relationship with all of Creation, other humans, and God.
One of Scruton’s great contributions is his clarity that there are no shortcuts to this relationship. He identifies addiction and pornography as efforts to realize the good of beauty on the cheap, to achieve the pleasure of relationship without the human effort needed for real beauty. Much of modernity is a “flight from beauty.”
Pornography, in particular, is “not a tribute to human beauty but a desecration of it.” This desecration, “which spoils the experience of freedom, is also a denial of love. It is an attempt to remake the world as though love were no longer a part of it.”
We often seek a shortcut to beauty in ways that are not really experiences of it, but of doing what is fashionable. Mass tourism has permitted millions to visit the Louvre in Paris and take a selfie next to the Mona Lisa, or to charge out to the latest museum exhibition. Abundant disposable income permits a competition to visit exotic places looking for the best view on earth or beyond, from climbing Mt. Everest to space tourism. We turn the truly beautiful from a relationship into what Scruton calls “kitsch” or, worse, idolatry.
If beauty is a relationship, and a relationship through the sensible and created with the immaterial and invisible Creator, we can find the beauty in a great painting or a sublime view only by seeking in them our right relationship with God: “Beauty is a call to renounce our narcissism and look with reverence on the world.”
We must turn not to shortcuts, but to seeking first the Kingdom of God as pilgrims. Then beauty – and truth and goodness – will be added unto us, along with all else that we need. For the relationship of beauty is a true human need.
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