What Does Beauty Do to Us.
Beauty, desire, horror and the expansion of the soul
I have continued to circle around an idea from last week's article: freedom is formative. The freedom God gives is not expressed only in the large decisions by which a life appears to change direction. It is exercised through repeated movements of attention, imagination, desire and will. Moment by moment, choice by choice, a person does more than decide what to do; through what he repeatedly attends to and practises, he participates in the formation of the one who will make the next decision.
Since writing that article, one word has remained with me more than the others: beauty. It has stuck with me. Partly because I am interested in it and need to develop my own thoughts around it; partly because, in my experience of Australian churchianity, beauty has seldom been treated as a serious subject in its own right. That may say more about the circles I have inhabited than it does about the whole Australian church, but I do not remember being taught to think about beauty with anything like the attention given to doctrine, morality, leadership or spiritual gifts. Beauty was certainly present in worship and in the character of particular people. Yet its presence was more often enjoyed than examined.
I am not writing as someone who has completed a theology of beauty. This is thought in motion. I perceive that beauty exists, that it has its source in God, and that experiencing it does something to a person. I am trying to understand what that something is. Of the three old words I have been using - Verum, Bonum, Pulchrum; Truth, Goodness, Beauty - beauty remains the most peculiar to me. Deception gives me a reasonably clear way to think about the privation of truth, while corruption and evil offer ways of thinking about the privation of goodness. The privation of beauty is harder to name. Ugliness does not seem adequate, because some people whose bodies have been terribly disfigured reveal breathtaking beauty, while a person with an attractive appearance may gradually become unpleasant to behold as something within the soul becomes visible through the face.
When beauty made faith believable
Brian Zahnd begins Beauty Will Save the World with an old account of the conversion of the people of Rus'. The Primary Chronicle, compiled more than a century after the events it describes, tells of Volodymyr the Great - Grand Prince of Kyiv, rather than a later Russian tsar - sending envoys to investigate the religions of neighbouring peoples. When the envoys attended Byzantine worship in Constantinople, they returned unable to say whether they had been standing in heaven or on earth. They could only say that God seemed to dwell among the people there, and that they could not forget the beauty they had encountered.
The story requires some care. Volodymyr's conversion was bound up with diplomacy, military power, marriage and the consolidation of his realm. The Chronicle's organised religious comparison may be a later foundation story rather than a report that would satisfy a modern historian. Even so, the story is revealing. It may not prove that beauty single-handedly converted a prince, but it shows that the people of Rus' came to narrate their conversion with beauty near its centre. When they told the story of why Byzantine Christianity became believable to them, they described an experience in which earthly worship opened onto heaven.
That possibility interests me enormously. Beauty may communicate before a person can fully explain what has been communicated. The envoys did not return with a carefully developed aesthetic theory. They returned with their ordinary categories disturbed. Heaven and earth had become difficult to separate because the whole material experience of Byzantine worship had made the invisible seem perceptible. Even if the account is legendary in form, the legend assumes that beauty can disclose reality. It can make a person apprehend something before he possesses the language to define it.
Beauty is not the same as attractiveness
Some years ago I heard Philip Yancey tell the story of meeting a woman in Nepal whose face and body had been permanently disfigured by leprosy. He described her, with his usual willingness to state an uncomfortable first impression, as the ugliest woman he had ever seen. After listening to her and speaking with his guide, he learned that she was the local prayer intercessor. If someone needed prayer, she was the person they wanted praying for them. As Yancey came to understand who she was, another kind of beauty became visible.
Nothing about that requires the effects of leprosy to be renamed as physically attractive. It does require attractiveness to surrender its claim to be the whole meaning of beauty. Her face had been disfigured, yet her soul had not been made ugly. The life within her body had become beautiful through faithfulness to God and love for other people. Her appearance told a true part of her story, including the fact that she had suffered, but it did not tell the whole truth about her. Once more of the person became visible, the meaning of what Yancey was seeing changed.
I thought of this again while listening to Debbie Ali tell the story of being kidnapped in Trinidad, held for ransom and subjected to severe abuse. Nothing about her captivity needs to be made beautiful. The men who harmed her do not become instruments of grace simply because the Lord met her in the horror, and a testimony of freedom does not provide the suffering with a pleasant ending that makes the violation acceptable. What struck me was the person speaking after it. The captivity had entered her story without retaining possession of her soul. She spoke of Christ, forgiveness and freedom with a joy that the people who had controlled her body had been unable to keep. I found myself observing something more than survival. I was observing beauty in a soul that had united itself to Christ. A beauty that outshone even the evilest of circumstance.
Experiences such as these make ugliness feel too superficial as the opposite of beauty. Physical damage can be ugly without the person being desecrated. A beautiful soul may become visible through a wounded body, perhaps with a force that a more attractive surface could never produce. Beauty appears to have some relationship with the truth of a whole person, and with what that person has become through the manner in which suffering, love, freedom and God have been received.
Beauty expands the soul
I have used the expression that beauty expands the soul, and I mean more by it than saying beauty improves my mood or gives me a larger emotional vocabulary. I mean that it expands the soul in a real metaphysical sense. I understand that such an expansion cannot be materially measured. That is rather the point. The soul is not a material organ, and demanding a physical instrument by which to measure metaphysical enlargement confuses the category under consideration.
The nearest image I presently have is breathing in fresh air without ever needing to exhale it. Beauty enters, but it does not have to leave in order to make room for what comes next. The soul expands around what it receives, retains it and becomes capable of receiving more. A piece of music heard years ago, an act of courage witnessed at the right moment, or the beauty of a person encountered in suffering can remain present long after the immediate experience has ended. The experience becomes part of the capacity by which later beauty is recognised. It is not simply that I know more after encountering beauty; in some manner I am more.
This is one reason I think experiencing beauty is spiritual. The transcendentals, if I am understanding them correctly, cannot have an origin independent of God. Truth, Goodness and Beauty are not three substances floating somewhere beyond the universe, nor are they labels human beings invented and then projected onto Him. They have their fullness and unity in the Lord. Created beauty participates in and reveals something of His invisible nature without becoming identical with Him. To receive beauty, then, is not merely to undergo a pleasant sensory event. Something originating in God enters human perception through creation and becomes part of the interior life of the person who receives it.
This may also explain why beauty produces a strange combination of satisfaction and greater capacity. Appetite usually seeks to be filled and then returns when the filling has passed. Beauty can satisfy without closing the person down. It can leave the soul more open than it was beforehand, able to receive, recognise and perhaps create what it could not have held before. Thinking for Christ's sake is connected to this. Thinking is not only the arrangement of propositions; it can become one of the means by which a person joins himself to Truth, Goodness and Beauty and is enlarged by them.
Beauty and desire
The distinction between beauty and desire remains unfinished in my mind. Desire is not itself evil. Hunger, sexual desire and the longing to make or share something good all belong to creaturely life. Beauty can awaken desire, and there are desires that become beautiful because they move towards communion, creation and love. Yet desire can also feed itself without enlarging the person who obeys it.
Pornography is useful here because it is plainly desirable to many people, yet I do not think I have ever heard it described as beautiful, even in a secular sense. It may borrow attractiveness from the human body, but its movement is towards consumption. The other person is presented for use, the appetite is stimulated, and satisfaction quickly gives way to the need for another image or experience. I am thankful that the Lord has delivered me from patterns of sexual sin, though I am not naive enough to imagine that temptation has ceased to exist. The freedom has lasted long enough that I am loath to surrender it.
My remaining contest with sugar is far less grave, although the movement of appetite can be remarkably similar. Sugar may expand my waistline while leaving my soul exactly where it was, except perhaps more insistent that another serving would solve the problem created by the first. Neither pornography nor sugar proves that pleasure is evil. A fine meal can be beautiful; sexual union within faithful love can be beautiful. I am trying to understand the difference between an experience that merely agitates appetite and one that gives the soul more room in which to live. Beauty can leave me wanting more, but the longing has a different direction. It makes me want to attend, to give thanks, to understand, or to create. Desire alone may want possession. Beauty invites participation.
I expect my thinking here will change as I continue working through Schopenhauer, whose account of the will and desire is considerably more developed than my own. For the moment, I am willing to say only that beauty does not appear to be another name for whatever attracts or pleases me. It has an enlarging quality, whereas desire can become a narrowing spiral in which appetite grows while the person becomes less free.
Beauty and betrayal in the same life
Philip Yancey's work has been one of the means by which beauty entered my own life. I would not know the name Fyodor Dostoevsky if not for his influence, and I cannot overstate what Dostoevsky's novels have given to my mind, spirit and soul. Yancey's willingness to write about grace, suffering, disappointment and the people he encountered around the world opened doors through which I later walked for myself. I remain grateful for that.
The disclosure earlier this year that Yancey had conducted an eight-year affair with a married woman therefore cannot sit outside this reflection. He has publicly confessed his conduct, described it as sinful, expressed remorse and repentance, entered counselling and accountability, and withdrawn from writing and speaking. It would be inaccurate to describe the sin now as unrepented. It would be equally inaccurate to treat repentance as though it removed the betrayal, the years of deception, or the harm done to his wife and the other family.
Over the years, I often detected a peculiar sadness in Yancey's writing. I cannot know how much of that belonged to the suffering he had witnessed, his own history, the hidden affair, or something else entirely. The disclosure does, however, place beauty and desecration within the same human frame. His writing cannot purchase absolution for his conduct. His conduct does not make every beautiful thing he wrote fraudulent, nor does it undo the genuine good that reached me through his work. The beauty remains beauty, and the betrayal remains betrayal. Neither can be permitted to rename the other.
A warning I took from Corrie ten Boom's The Hiding Place concerned the temptation to compare sins, as though another person's more grievous failure proves my own goodness. I do not want to use Yancey's life in that way. His conduct deserves clear naming, but he does not belong to a different moral species from me. I have seen beauty and horror combined in people I admired, in people with whom I served and worshipped, in people who once looked to me, and in myself. A human being may communicate truth while practising deception elsewhere, create beauty while accommodating a private desecration, or perform genuine good while allowing another part of the soul to become corrupt. That does not make moral judgement impossible. It makes self-righteous judgement unreliable.
The combination at Calvary
Last week I described Calvary as the ultimate combination of the transcendentals and their privations. I still think combination is the right word. Collision suggests two separable forces striking one another. Combination retains the confusion of seeing good and evil within the same frame, which has become part of the human condition. Human beings were not created to gain knowledge of evil by participating in it. Yet the choice to eat from the forbidden tree brought the knowledge of good and evil together within human experience, and history since then has required both to be seen in scenes that cannot simply be pulled apart.
The covenant at Sinai is one such scene. The Lord invited a people into holiness and bound Himself to them, and the response was betrayal described in Scripture with deliberately offensive sexual language. One of the most beautiful acts imaginable - God making covenant with a people - became the setting for spiritual whoredom. I am slow to point cursing fingers at Israel, because I too have betrayed the Lord and been unfaithful to the covenant made in the blood of His Son. The combination is not safely confined to an ancient people. It appears wherever divine gift and human betrayal occupy the same history. That includes my own history with the Lord, as much as it does the children of Israel.
At the cross the combination is complete. It is beautiful in the love and sacrifice displayed, and horrific in the torture and brutal means by which a human life is ended. The horror is not made beautiful because God redeems through it. Betrayal remains betrayal, torture remains torture, and the public destruction of a body remains desecration. Yet Christ is beautiful there. His body is wounded without His love becoming corrupt. He is mocked and murdered without His hatred of sin splashing over onto the hatred of the person committing the sin. How extraordinary.
This is not moral blending. C.S. Lewis writes in The Great Divorce how thinkers in his time imagined that good and evil could not be so easily separated; that they were in some way indistinguishable. But good and evil do not become equal ingredients in a higher harmony. They are combined in view, not in value. The cross refuses to let me crop the horror from the picture, but it also refuses to let horror possess the whole picture. Human beings display what they are capable of doing to God, while God displays what He is willing to do for human beings. Truth, Goodness and Beauty are opposed by deception, corruption and desecration in the same frame, and the parasitical privations exhaust themselves without succeeding in making Christ ugly.
Learning to hold beauty and horror together
Perhaps the most difficult lesson of the last decade has been learning to hold indescribable beauty and unspeakable horror in view at the same time. I have watched trusted people reveal capacities I did not know were present. I have also been forced to see that the same possibility exists within me. The task is not to call the horror beautiful or to treat the beauty as a disguise. It is to resist the mind's demand that one reality must cancel the other before the person or the event can be understood.
Jordan Peterson tells a relevant clinical story in Beyond Order. A young man had been raised in a strict religious environment with the belief that adults were angels and incapable of serious evil. After becoming involved in an abusive relationship with another man, his mind was unable to process at the unconscious level what was happening. Subsequently he suffered severe sleep disturbance and night terrors. And what was Peterson's treatment? It was to read Ordinary Men, The Rape of Nanking, and other works detailing atrocities committed by human beings against each other. Through this controlled exposure the young man's mind was able to expand. Not by encountering the 'beauty' of evil, but rather than evil and malevolence were real, unavoidable and present; but that these phenomena need not be avoided or somehow pretended away. Malevolence exists; but so does benevolence. According to Peterson, the symptoms subsided as the man developed an account of reality in which the existence of evil could be accepted.
I do not take from that story an invitation to fill the imagination with horror. I take a warning against requiring reality to remain innocent in order for faith in beauty to survive. Evil that cannot be named becomes more powerful because it remains outside the categories by which a person understands the world. At the same time, a soul that attends almost exclusively to betrayal, corruption and desecration will be formed by the things it studies. The task is to remain aware of darkness without allowing attention to become oriented around it.
The answer, as I presently understand it, is to direct attention towards beauty as often and as fully as possible without pretending that its privation does not exist. Music, art and literature can be received as more than recreation. The beauty of another person's soul can become an encounter with the invisible attributes of God. Attention itself can become worship when it is directed towards what comes from Him. This does not require evil to be ignored. It requires evil to be seen truthfully without being allowed to become the principal object around which the soul is organised.
I confess readily the incompletion of these thoughts. I do not yet have a definition of beauty that resolves every question, and tomorrow's reading may expose clumsy parts of what I have written today. I am increasingly convinced, however, that beauty is not decorative to discipleship, but participates in formation by entering the soul, enlarging it, and increasing the capacity to receive and create more. To abide in beauty is to look towards the Lord, from whom every genuine beauty proceeds, and to allow the posture of the soul to be directed towards Him.
The good news, as I reflected last week, is that the Lord gives me a choice concerning what I will become moment by moment. In this moment I choose again to focus upon, celebrate and enjoy His Truth, His Goodness and, this evening most pointedly, His Beauty. Specifically, I choose the beauty represented at the cross. I am His joy, and He endured its brutality for my sake. I do not know that there can be another truth, another expression of goodness, or another beauty that could hope to eclipse the cross.
