By Joseph R. Wood
As I write, on the day some Orthodox celebrate as the feast of the Transfiguration according to the Julian calendar, I have had several experiences of beauty this very morning. The sunrise through the trees of West Virginia, the sunlight entering an Orthodox monastery church and illuminating the rising incense smoke around the icons, the singing, the recollection of the faces of those I love, and so on.
As I crossed the country this summer, I imagined, or at least hoped, that I was more attentive to the beauty around me than I had been on similar journeys earlier in my life. Perhaps it was because I called the trip, with some grandiloquence, a “pilgrimage,” and tried 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 of which God the Father spoke at that moment is the pleasure of the source of all beauty.
Yet, with all that, beauty remains a mystery to me. I have always thought that I do not “make beauty” well.
It is a confusing matter. “There is no accounting for taste,” we are told, which suggests that beauty “is in the eye of the beholder.” These clichés surely contain some truth. But dismissing beauty as an entirely subjective matter is not enough to explain it, nor to explain the need we feel to share it with others.
Some writers have identified “real beauty” with human faces or bodies, or with particular examples of art and architecture. I think these efforts are as confused as I am. But they too are seeking the “what is” of real beauty.
A great help in 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, although subjectivity is very much involved. Adopting an explicitly incarnational view of the body, he states that “human beauty belongs to our embodiment, and art that ‘objectifies’ the body, tearing it from the realm of moral relations, can never capture the true beauty of the human form.”
Beauty is inextricably linked to goodness, and therefore to moral questions.
The book is an example of one of my favorite “genres”: works by philosophers and theologians who no longer need to write in a competitive or academic way. These authors are on the other side of much thought, scholarship, or prayer—or possibly all three. The books are brief and simple, and present settled conclusions. They tend toward wisdom (the brief trilogy by Pope Benedict XVI 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 what I say it is. There is an objective reality to which the person responds in some subjective 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 invite us to place this experience at the center of our lives. If we do so, it then offers a place of refreshment from which we will never tire. But to imagine that we can do this and remain free to see beauty as nothing more than subjective preference is to misunderstand the depth with 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 well as right action.
Scruton does not say what I would add (though he is not irreligious). But I believe his brief book points to beauty (and to truth and goodness) not only 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 right relationship with all Creation, with other humans, and with God.
One of Scruton’s great contributions is his clarity that there are no shortcuts to this relationship. He identifies addiction and pornography as attempts to realize the good of beauty at a low price, to attain the pleasure of relationship without the human effort required for real beauty. Much of modernity is a “flight from beauty.”
Pornography, in particular, “is not a tribute to human beauty, but a profanation of it.” This profanation, “which spoils the experience of freedom, is also a denial of love. It is an attempt to remake the world as if love no longer formed 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 allowed millions to visit the Louvre in Paris and take a selfie beside the Mona Lisa, or rush to the latest museum exhibition. Abundant disposable income allows competition to visit exotic places in search of the best view on earth or beyond, from climbing Everest to space tourism. We turn what is truly beautiful in 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 only find beauty in a great painting or a sublime view by seeking in them our right relationship with God: “Beauty is a call to renounce our narcissism and to look at the world with reverence.”
We must not turn to shortcuts, but seek first the Kingdom of God as pilgrims. Then beauty—and truth and goodness—will be given to us as well, along with everything else we need. For the relationship of beauty is a true human need.
About the author
Joseph Wood is Collegiate Assistant Professor in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America. He is a pilgrim philosopher and an easily accessible hermit.