The Power of Beauty
Imagine threading your way through a crowded foreign city. Suddenly, a well-known face appears—not an informal acquaintance, but a cherished friend. The sudden shock of familiarity regularly gives strategy to deep delight and a way of profound relief. You in some way feel at home on this strange place. Speaking figuratively, beauty is a bit just like the face of that friend. As such, it inspires deep-seated feelings of joy, delight, and peace. Consider these words from Elaine Scarry, “At the moment one comes into the presence of something beautiful, it greets you. It lifts away from the neutral background as if coming forward to welcome you—as if the thing were designed to ‘fit’ your perception.”[1]
At the danger of sounding merely pragmatic, those of us who wish to achieve a weary world with the message of Christ are making a serious strategic mistake if we overlook the facility of beauty. I need to contemplate this power under two broad headings, namely, captivation and hospitality. In a world overflowing with distractions, the gorgeous not only arrests our attention. It captivates us, filling us with awe, joy, and gratitude. But, as Scarry notes, it does greater than captivate. Beauty is hospitable within the sense that it welcomes us into its vision.
Why We’re Suspicious of Beauty
Before we enterprise any further, though, we want to confront a preferred misconception that ties beauty exclusively to its formal expressions. For the sake of brevity, let’s put this formal expression of beauty under the heading of the Institution of the Fine Arts (IOFA). IOFA can include the whole lot from painting and sculpture to music, poetry, literature, filmmaking, and architecture. I need to focus on two major reasons for why this line of pondering leads us astray regarding beauty. The first involves elitism. Naturally, the IOFA requires a high degree of coaching and skill, and while the skilled guild of artists can yield quite a bounty, it also tends to foster the belief that beauty belongs mainly to professionals. But most of us will recognize on an intuitive level that artists don’t have a monopoly on beauty. A shocking sunset, the pale bloom of flowers in spring, a small child leaping through a sprinkler—these on a regular basis events attest to the universal reach of beauty and take us well beyond the partitions of the gallery.
The second reason for resisting the equation of beauty with its formal expressions has to do with ugliness. Ironically, an excellent deal of up to date art is deliberately and aggressively ugly, confronting its audience with bracing attacks on what was formerly deemed sacred. Whether it involves crucifixes submerged in human waste or deformed representations of the human body, an excellent deal of today’s art constitutes a flight from beauty, quite than an embrace of it.
Why are so lots of today’s artists attacking beauty? This is a posh query and even a modest answer could be an ambitious undertaking. For the sake of the current discussion, nonetheless, I need to attract on the wisdom of Roger Scruton to make clear one aspect of it. Specifically, I need to call attention to the proven fact that acts of desecration within the art world are often attempts at playing God. To a significant extent, the fashionable vision of reality activates a desire for power and control. Long gone is the venerable tradition of conforming the soul to reality. Instead, the current aim is to govern reality and convey it into conformity with human wishes. For this reason, the ambition of much contemporary art is to announce itself as a daring message from the long run that shatters the idols of our past.[2] The artistic hostility against the church lately is a transparent example of this.
What would drive an Andres Serrano to his vaunted works of desecration involving sacred objects? In a word, a principled resistance to a sacred order, since such an order recognizes that human beings are subordinate to their creator. As Scruton aptly observes, “For beauty makes a claim on us: it’s a call to surrender our narcissism and look with reverence on the world.”[3] But that reverence is based on the Lordship of the creator. In this sense, beauty is a blessed rebuke to our feeble attempts at playing God. To stare up on the sky on a transparent night within the countryside, to be dwarfed in a redwood forest, to carry a newborn infant in your arms—these moments do greater than fill us with awe and wonder; they humble us, reminding us that the rightful posture as we make our way through God’s good world is one among worship.
Beauty as a Basic Human Need
We need water, food, shelter, and rest. We need companionship, love, and acceptance. And we want beauty. It is numbered amongst our most elementary human needs. In the words of Frederick Buechner, “Beauty is to the spirit what food is to the flesh.”[4]
If we’re tempted to consider beauty as a luxury, we’d do well to contemplate the role of decorating in on a regular basis life. Not everyone has the exquisite taste of an interior designer, after all, but everyone strives for a sort of visual consolation of their living spaces.[5] We don’t desire a mere shelter from the weather, the spartan furnishings of a jail cell, or the generic backdrop of a hotel room; we wish a home. Think also of the role of plants and gardens, particularly in places of great poverty. Why are there flowers and potted plants within the slums of Nairobi, as an example? Aren’t gardens within the midst of such poverty a drain on resources that must be directed elsewhere? Not if beauty is to the soul as food is to the flesh. We won’t perish without an art gallery, but we’ll perish without beauty.
Hospitality Rather Than Seduction
Having established that beauty is a basic human need that features formal expressions, but isn’t limited to them, I’d prefer to turn to an important artist whose work offers a holistic vision of captivation and hospitality.
In The Angel and the Voyager, I draw attention to the paintings of the American master, Thomas Cole. A person of devout faith, Cole was determined to glorify God in his work by offering a spiritual vision that was as truthful because it was edifying. One of his late masterpieces is The Voyage of Life, a series of 4 paintings, each of which captures a distinct phase of the topic’s life. Childhood, Youth, Manhood, and Old Age offer a panoramic view of a human lifetime, capturing its joys and trials, in addition to God’s care throughout the journey. In each of those paintings, the topic is presided over by an angel, even in moments of severe adversity. By capturing the tumultuous nature of human life with stunning skill and accuracy, Cole invites his audience right into a spiritual vision that honors the sufferings of our present world without giving them the last word. In this sense, The Voyage of Life captivates us, arresting our attention, but then it invites us to contemplate a world fashioned by the God who draws us to Himself.
In Psalm 27:4, King David proclaims, “One thing I actually have asked of the LORD, that I’ll seek after: that I could dwell in the home of the LORD all of the days of my life, to gaze upon the fantastic thing about the LORD and to inquire in his temple.” As Christian men and ladies, we wish to do greater than share about Christ. We wish to invite people to gaze upon His beauty.
[1] Ellaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 25.
[2] Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 169.
[3] Ibid., 173.
[4] Available online: https://www.frederickbuechner.com/quote-of-the-day/2016/12/9/beauty
[5] I’m indebted to the artist, Mark Sprinkle, for this insight.
Photo Credit: ©Getty Images/Ben-Schonewille
Kenneth Boa equips people to like well (being), learn well (knowing), and live well (doing). He is a author, teacher, speaker, and mentor and is the President of Reflections Ministries, The Museum of Created Beauty, and Trinity House Publishers.
Publications by Dr. Boa include Conformed to His Image, Handbook to Prayer, Handbook to Leadership, Faith Has Its Reasons, Rewriting Your Broken Story, Life within the Presence of God, Leverage, and Recalibrate Your Life.
Dr. Boa holds a B.S. from Case Institute of Technology, a Th.M. from Dallas Theological Seminary, a Ph.D. from New York University, and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in England.
