We live in a sacramental world. As the Psalmist teaches us, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” This visible world “Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge,” making the nature and power of the invisible God clear to all who are willing to see.
This visible, physical world has been made to be a sign – a manifestation of invisible, spiritual realities – a general grace and revelation to all its creatures. The physical world is a cosmic materialization of meaning. All things possess not only physical and chemical nature but also a spiritual nature that gives them form, meaning, purpose, and value.
Thus, the ancient transcendentals – truth, goodness, and beauty – still give us the best way of understanding beauty. All things which are, which have being, have all three of the qualities of being: goodness, truth, and beauty. Beauty is the radiance of being. It is the radiance of God’s glory and delight shining through all the things he has made.
Is beauty relative to our tastes?
Beauty is both objective and subjective; objective because it is a quality grounded in the character of God and subjective because it is something we experience in particular ways.
As embodied beings, we cannot experience Beauty itself. We always encounter beauty in particular material forms. Our experience of beauty always has context. So while beauty derives its existence from the life of the Triune God, which exists outside of and independent of our perception, yet we access it by subjective means.
Subjective does not mean relative. A Nazi camp can never be beautiful in the same way as a new born baby. There are objective categories and principles of beauty which play out in our subjective experience of it. For example, because God is a God of order and harmony, not of chaos and discord, a rightly tuned aesthetic sense will find beauty in balance and ugliness in chaos. This is why we perceive Michalangelo’s David as beautiful but Goya’s Titan as somewhat ‘ugly’.
What makes something ugly?
A sacramental view can still account for ugliness because God has made this world to contain contingencies and possibilities. What he has made good and beautiful can be turned for evil and made ugly. When those creatures who have been given free will take God’s created things and force them to work in ways that go against God’s character and will, the radiance of goodness and truth is dimmed and originally good and beautiful things become ugly.
Ugliness is the quenching of God’s delights through the distortion of his good creation. God created our hands to love and serve and as our hands live out this purpose with integrity, they are beautiful, even when old and gnarled by years of toil. When our hands turn away from God’s purpose, the radiance of his delight is broken and they become darkened, ugly, materializations not of goodness and truth but materializations of sin and lies.
In this way, beauty and ugliness always have a moral dimension. In order to have a coherent aesthetic, morality must be grounded in a teleological view of the world. The goodness and beauty of a thing are both related to the true purpose of a thing. God created birds to fly and so it is good for them to fly, and beautiful. A broken wing is not good nor beautiful because it is a manifestation of a broken purpose.
However, because of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ, aesthetics also have a redemptive dynamic. What is ugly can become a vessel of the beautiful because of the redemptive work of Christ. The cross is a cruel perversion of good and beautiful wood. And were it not for the atonement and resurrection of Christ, this instrument of pain and death would still be experienced as ugly. Yet we now wear it as jewelry and hang it as decoration because the cross has been transformed into and object of wild beauty. Through self-sacrificing love, goodness and truth have been birthed anew within its formally distorted form. In this way, through the redeeming love of Christ, the ugly broken things of this world can become again restored to God’s purposes and filled again with the radiance of his goodness and truth, that is, again filled with beauty.
What is Art?
Accordingly, I define art as the co-creative work of humans in the materialization of meaning. Anytime we take the forms God has created and combine them into some new composite form, we have made art; we have materialized something that is full of meaning. This creative action includes both the objects we create as well as the action itself. The act of living and creating can itself be an art, a materialization of meaning in time and space through the use of our own bodies. We can make bad art that wars against the meaning inherent in our materials, or good art that harmoniously and more fully manifests the latent good and true meanings that God has materialized in this world for our creative activity and pleasure. This cosmos is God’s great artwork and any creative work we enact in it is a participation in art, in the materialization of meaning.
This is why we have Edith Schaeffer’s “Art of Homemaking” or the art of woodworking and many other uses of art. All our activity has an aesthetic dimension because the whole cosmos has an aesthetic dimension.
However, we can distinguish “fine art” from other more general aesthetic activity. Fine art is the creation of objects that have no other practical purpose. A tea cup can be art in the general sense – and that is why one can find them at an art museum – but it is not fine art in the specific sense because it also has a practical purpose, a use. A painting or sculpture has no use. It is created for aesthetic pleasure alone.
Beauty in your world
Friend, you live in a sacramental world, permeated with beauty and meaning. As you go about your day, doing and making things, pay attention to what things mean. Pay attention to patterns and harmonies, to color and light. Beauty is God glory and delight made manifest to you each day. How can you live your ordinary day in a way that savors, honors, and cultivates this beauty, for God’s glory and your delight?