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The Fierce Reality of Beauty

In her latest book, The Wounds of Beauty, Princeton Theological Seminary Professor Margarita Mooney Clayton (then publishing as Margarita Mooney Suarez) has convened a cadre of intellectuals who, despite their wide-ranging areas of expertise (among them cheese-making and iconography), share a fervent belief that Beauty is essential both for ultimate happiness and for present flourishing. To some, their enthusiasm may seem a bit extreme. But for Mooney Clayton and her interlocutors, Beauty is not so much a pretty picture as a fierce metaphysical poke. 

“Beauty,” notes poet Dana Gioia, “has almost nothing to do with being decorous or pleasant.” For him, Beauty is “an experience, a perception through some natural or artistic lens of the underlying order of the universe.” This underlying order, while replete with things that are both pleasing and pretty, does not preclude others that are imbued with suffering. Most would prefer the former take center stage, but even the most jejune observer would have to admit tragedy and trials are part of our universe’s frame.

In the face of this reality, Gioia offers this: “[T]ragedy and suffering are not pretty, but they can be beautiful if they are framed and perceived in a way that shows their meaning.” Beauty is much more capacious than our puerile or prurient preferences, and what it offers in the face of painful experiences is a redeeming and transformative significance. 

To illustrate, Gioia appeals to Christ’s crucifixion: “Christ’s sacrifice is beautiful—it reveals through Jesus’ pain the shape of God’s design for human redemption. It reveals those secrets not despite the pain but through it.” He adds, “In the Renaissance, depictions of martyrs in heaven show the saints holding the instruments of their death and torture triumphantly. They proclaim the beauty of their terrible deaths as seen from the perspective of eternity.”

Again and again, Gioia stresses that Beauty’s event horizon is infinite. We collapse it to our detriment, exchanging something that would be majestic and complete for an inchoate puzzle piece. While such a thing may be more easily pocketed, that approach diminishes what experiences of beauty could otherwise be: an opportunity to overcome—rather than feed—our solipsistic tendencies. 

In the book’s introduction, Mooney Clayton makes this point succinctly, writing:

Experiences of beauty can become moments of self-transcendence, in which we realize that we are not alone in this world and that we did not create ourselves. When we see the world around us as a gift, new possibilities are always on the horizon.

There are always more data points to be had, and taking note of them can strengthen our grip on the underlying order that exists in beautiful experiences. The operative word there is, of course, can. Having more pieces of the puzzle is helpful, but if we haven’t a clue how they’re supposed to fit or any sense of their ultimate significance, they’ll probably start to look and feel more and more like detritus. 

However, just because we may not have the entire picture yet, doesn’t mean the pieces are unimportant. In the chapter “Art Is A Jealous God: The Imperative of Beauty,” Poet James Matthew Wilson says, “[N]ature always bears the possibility of being more than what it appears. Creation always has a deeper mystery to itself, and the mystery is not the unknown—mystery in the Catholic sense: a mystery is a truth that is inexhaustibly deep. Hence we can say nature is a mystery—not because it is unintelligible, but because the created world is always an entrance into a deeper, higher reality, or reality after reality, until it reaches the infinite light of God.” 

James 1:17 tells us, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” Pastor Timothy Keller has said that every time we experience one of those good gifts in creation—a delicious meal, a fun event, a beautiful person, for example—we are being given the chance to run up the sunbeam (whatever that good thing might be) right to its origin: the Sun.

Enjoying the fullness and completeness of the whole can be undermined, not by attacking Beauty with a scalpel, but by being unduly philosophical.

Still, for some, “the infinite light of God” may feel beyond their reach. Sunbeams are steep, or else, simply too intangible, and running up them ostensibly requires more than a fair share of athletic ability. But to those who would feel discouraged, Wilson is quick to add that our pursuit of Beauty is in no way one-sided: “Beauty is nothing other than the capacity of being as such, of existent form, to disclose itself. At the very root of existence is the capacity of existence to share itself, to give itself away in a myriad of ways.”

Beauty isn’t playing games. Rather, like Wilson says, it is unwaveringly engaged in showcasing the underlying order and character of the universe in a cornucopia of ways, and in light of that, if we still feel Beauty to be aloof and arcane, the question has to be asked: is Beauty the one to blame?

“One way to think about what it means to encounter or perceive Beauty,” Wilson says, “is that what seems initially unfamiliar can, in fact, become deeply familiar.” As unfamiliar as Beauty might initially seem, it, like anyone else, can become more familiar if we’re willing to receive it with goodwill and expend some energy. 

The first energy expenditure has to be rescinding our attention from other—lesser—things. In the chapter “Roger Scruton and Saving Culture from Meaninglessness,” Francis Maier makes it clear that this will require a fair bit of swimming upstream because modern culture has inundated us with anesthetics, distractions, and noise-making. In the chapter “Practical Living and the Human Desire for Beauty,” musician George Harne reiterates this state of things and makes no bones about the fact that “[a]t some point there comes a John the Baptist moment when you have to go in and repent of all distractions. You have to clear the floor to make room for the good.” 

Assuming we take that advice and sweep all the fluff and junk aside thereby giving Beauty’s messages an actual place in our lives, it eventually comes time for us to formulate some sort of reply. As with most everything, it is much easier to get that wrong than to get it right. 

The Wounds of Beauty touches on several common missteps when it comes to responding to Beauty’s correspondence. Both Harne and Maier caution against deconstruction. Dissecting everything might feel like an intellectual flex, they note, but in the end, we’ll have made a mess and have nothing left that is worth having. Harne specifies, “‘It’s not about pulling the arms off the doll and seeing what’s inside.’ We have to enjoy the fullness and the completeness of the whole.” 

However, Harne also notes that enjoying the fullness and completeness of the whole can be undermined, not by attacking Beauty with a scalpel, but by being unduly philosophical. While it might be momentarily exhilarating to punt Beauty into a platonic plane, doing so is, unsurprisingly, going to push it further away. Harne stresses, “Experiencing beauty begins with our embodied experience. Beauty is not meant to be ponderous or oppressive or analytical or abstract.” 

On this point, Harne and James Matthew Wilson overlap. Far from being something floating out in deep space, Wilson says Beauty is readily apparent in something as proximate as an infant’s face: “The experience of beauty is primary, primeval, but it is also ultimate. It is an infant’s smile and an old man’s wisdom … both first and last.” Beauty bookends our existence, and as such, it generates an allure few things can. 

While that allure is not itself bad, it does mean that using Beauty—bending its light towards causes and creeds we want to spotlight—is a very real temptation. On this point, Dana Gioia offers a historical perspective: “Totalitarian regimes take art seriously. They understand how powerfully notions of beauty shape people’s sense of reality. That is why repressive regimes invest so heavily in creating an official style of art that expresses the government’s vision. Think of Soviet socialist realism, Italian fascist neo-classical modernism, Maoist heroic realism, or the gigantic scale of North Korean government monuments.” These are instances where Beauty’s overtures were met—not with a goodwill reply—but with concerted distortions and outright lies. Elsewhere, Gioia points out, “Beauty is related to a sense of objective reality, which we may not entirely grasp, but which we can approach. We replicate that experience in art.” 

Art—all art—is meant to be a sunbeam that reflects, projects, and helps us to detect the Sun, an objective reality that compromises itself for nothing and no one. Therefore, as Wilson says, “Superimpositions of morality, piety, or politics are disfigurements. They are failures of trust.” 

Such disfigurements most often occur when we don’t trust Beauty to speak for itself. Or else when we think it should—in fact, we actively want it to—say something else. In those instances, there is a subtle, seamless shift from the misstep that says “Beauty is for me” (that is, it exists for my use and benefit) to “Beauty is whatever I want it to be.” 

At the denouement of Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince, we see that exact shift when, after the Happy Prince gives away all the jewels and gold adorning his body to help the poor, the community leaders decide he’s not much to look at anymore:

So they pulled down the statue of the Happy Prince. “As he is no longer beautiful he is no longer useful,” said the Art Professor at the University.

Then they melted the statue in a furnace, and the Mayor held a meeting of the Corporation to decide what was to be done with the metal. 

“We must have another statue, of course,” he said, “and it shall be a statue of myself.” 

“Of myself,” said each of the Town Councillors, and they quarreled. When I last heard of them they were quarreling still.

In the Mayor and Co.’s eyes, the Happy Prince no longer served his purpose. He was a waste of space best melted down and replaced with something more to their tastes. Unfortunately, as Wilde depicts, those who fail to see that Beauty has intrinsically good properties above and beyond mere aesthetic utility, also fail to see both it and themselves clearly. 

In The Wounds of Beauty’s introduction, Mooney Clayton observes, “Misunderstandings about beauty have contributed to a contentious public culture and often even a religious culture devoid of reverence.” It is entirely usual for us to want to be up on that pedestal—to be not just prince, but king over everything, including Beauty—but if there is a pair of misunderstandings about Beauty and our relationship to it that foments contention and irreverence it is the one expressed in The Happy Prince: “Beauty is what I say it is, and it is me.” Francis Maier deflates that conceit: “Beauty encourages us to see that life is good and that human beings have a rightful place in the world.” Rightful—not highest. The pedestal is not for us, but our understanding of who does have the rightful claim to the highest place gives us an idea of where we rank. 

We’re told in Ephesians 2:10, “For we are God’s masterpiece, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God has prepared that we should walk in them.” And as Wilson says, “Our understanding of intrinsic goods comes from our understanding of what it means to be human. … Beauty helps us see human nature is fundamentally participatory.” 

In Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Dom Cobb makes this observation: “An idea is like a virus. Resilient. Highly contagious. And even the smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you.” The Wounds of Beauty is predicated on the belief that Beauty changes everything and that its seeds, whether expressed in poetry, music, art, and/or cheese, germinate life and life abundantly. Harne says, “An encounter with beauty does not automatically rescue us but it may plant the seeds for a future rescue, the nature that grace may one day perfect.” That that perfection is ongoing is clear. However, Ecclesiastes 3:11 tells us that God has made everything beautiful in the fullness of time, and the central insight of The Wounds of Beauty is that when we encounter Beauty, we are being invited along for the ride.

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