Will Beauty Really Save the World?
By Mike Schramm
Objective Beauty as an Argument for God
The late Pope Benedict XVI said that “art and the saints are the greatest apologetic for our faith.” This is because they both have the same basic root—beauty. It was the Russian Orthodox novelist and prophet, Fyodor Dostoevsky, who famously said that “beauty will save the world.” This can only be true if there is some essential connection between beauty and the One whom both Benedict and Dostoevsky recognized as their Savior—Jesus Christ.
“You Either Get It or You Don’t”?
Many defenders of belief in God or Christianity will refer to an argument from beauty as something that helped them come or deepen their faith. However, this is often only presented with examples and couched in terms of “you either get it or you don’t.” This can come off as arbitrary to one who doesn’t “get it.” It can also fall on deaf ears in a world that assumes beauty is purely subjective. However, the classical, objective understanding of beauty, indicated by the harmony, clarity, and integrity of the substance, reflects God’s nature and therefore points one to recognition of God’s existence.
Beauty Transforms
Christianity was founded by, and united to, beauty incarnate, Jesus Christ. Therefore, Christianity must reflect this beauty to the world in order to attract it to Christ. Of course, so much work has been done to present the beauty of the Church’s artwork as a way to evangelize. It will continue to be an important way to wake a culture worn-down to the wonder of God’s Creation, and our subcreative participation in it. The Church will also need to highlight how this beauty appears even more prominently in her saints, her children, in a way that cannot be matched.
Many who converted to, reverted back to, or simply deepened their own faith in Jesus refer to something beautiful as a major factor that helped them see the truth. Even when we contemplate truth, what is being contemplated and not just confirmed is the beauty that is found within it. When a story, whether it is mythological or historical, captures our imagination it is the beauty of that story that does so. Beauty is what draws us in and compels us forward. It was the beauty of fair maidens that motivated knights to quest. It was the beauty of the Shire that kept Sam and Frodo’s hearts from despair. It is the beauty of their children that inspires the total sacrifice of mothers everywhere and all times. Beauty changes lives.
What we need now is for the Church to use the beauty of her tradition to point the world back to God.
The tricky thing about beauty is that we have this assumption it is completely “in the eye of the beholder.” You could put the words “what is beauty?” into Pilate’s mouth when he has Jesus on trial, asking with the same cynicism he asked our Lord “what is truth?” (John 18:38). While it is clear we all have different preferences, the idea that beauty is purely subjective should strike us as deeply unsatisfying. It is not only objective, like truth and goodness, but there are specific features to beauty that we can identify.
St. Thomas Aquinas considered beauty to be an extension of God’s nature as a “transcendental.” In his Summa Theologiae (ST), Aquinas discusses the other transcendentals of oneness (see ST I. Q 11) and truth (see ST I. Q 16). These transcendentals were considered convertible with being, or existence itself (see ST I. Q 16. A 3). Aquinas referred to this as ipsum esse (being itself) and considered it the best way to describe God’s nature (see ST I. Q 4. A 2). This shows how God is not just another part of Creation, nor is God identified with Creation, but the reality in which all other things participate in existence. This includes both the physical universe as well as the invisible realities like truth, goodness, and beauty.
What Is Beauty?
For St. Thomas Aquinas, beauty flows from God’s essence, and since God exists as an objective reality, beauty does as well. Beauty, therefore, does not reside merely in the eye of the beholder or depend on subjective taste. Instead, it can be recognized through objective features. Aquinas identifies three such objective properties of beauty: harmony, clarity, and integrity (see ST I. Q 39. A 8). Beauty must rest upon objective realities if it is to flow from the nature of God, which St. Thomas Aquinas and the Catholic Tradition recognize as the ground of reality itself (see ST I. Q 4. A 2). These properties must also be objective in order to act as essential elements of beauty as an objective reality. Instead of causing beauty as if it were something beneath us, humans participate in beauty when we create things that reflect these three objective elements. All three of these essential elements of beauty serve, and are reflected in, the final cause of the substance. This flows logically from beauty’s convertibility with being. It is also because beauty is the recognition of the goodness that is inherent in the substance itself (ST I. Q 5. A 4). This goodness is realized in the substance’s fulfillment of its purpose, telos, or final cause. This will be shown in the specific descriptions of each below.
Harmony
Harmony names the proportion among parts in relation to one another. It describes how the elements of a thing fit together. We perceive it when certain colors complement each other or when musical notes sound right together—what we literally call harmonizing. We also see harmony in visual symmetry, especially in works of art and in the human face. Harmony points to the beauty of an object because an object whose disparate parts are aligned according to the whole can work toward its own purpose more effectively. The harmony in beauty is proportionate to the goodness to which these parts are ordered.
Clarity
Clarity names the radiance present in a thing itself. We perceive it in the purity of a color or the cleanliness of a room. Its most striking example appears in the contrast between the face of a living person and that of the dead. Clarity is the means by which beauty makes itself known to us. Artists typically want viewers to grasp what a work is saying, and clarity is what enables that understanding. Clarity is a reflection of the “life” that is present within a work. This life is not merely biological, but can also be spiritual and metaphorical. It is recognized in the visual arts by the purity of the color being used. For example, we know a healthy flower by its color, so if one were painting said flower one would also look for a similar hue. It is reflected in the clarity of the object itself. Because life is metaphysically “better” than death, it carries within it a greater reality, a living thing reflects more goodness and is capable of more beauty.
Integrity
Integrity refers to the completeness of a thing: every essential part is present. These parts not only function together but also serve the essence of the whole. Integrity depends on an object’s purpose, or telos, since that purpose determines which parts must be present in the first place. Many people recognize integrity in the beauty of team sports. When players carry out their assigned roles to score a goal, basket, or touchdown, they fit together in harmony and act in service of the game’s purpose. Integrity, similar to harmony, has to do with the working together of parts, with a greater focus on the nature of the substance itself. This speaks to the goodness of identity as such. A thing can only be beautiful if it is a distinct thing in which one can recognize beauty.
How Does This Point to God?
One of the oldest ideas about God, and one of the oldest arguments for God’s existence, is known as the argument from degrees of perfection. A succinct treatment of this argument is presented by St. Thomas Aquinas (see ST I. Q 2. A 3). It states that some things are better, truer, or more beautiful than others. We can only judge things as “more” or “less” by comparing them to something that is the “most,” the standard of goodness, truth, or beauty. This standard of beauty must precede any instantiation of beauty. This standard of beauty must also transcend every beautiful thing that participates in it. Even despite disagreements of what is considered beautiful, there must still be a standard upon which the example falls. This standard, not just of goodness, truth, and beauty, but all existence, is God.
One can find objective markers for recognizing beauty, indicated by harmony, clarity, and integrity. Every beautiful thing then participates on a standard of beauty to various degrees. This standard precedes, transcends, and encompasses all beautiful things. It is beauty itself. This beauty is convertible with all truth, all goodness, and all being. It is what many understand to be God.
How Does the Church Argue for God from Beauty?
There is a well-known, convicting quote in A Severe Mercy, wherein convert Sheldon Vanauken writes that both the best and worst arguments for and against Christianity respectively are Christians themselves. Interestingly, the reasons he gives for Christianity, “joy,” “certainty,” and “completeness,” (location 1268) sound similar to the very concepts of proportion, clarity, and integrity.
The above recognition illustrates a well-established, practical truth about the spread of the Gospel in the world. It also alludes to the fact that the only argument for God from beauty is not an argument at all. The Christians who radiate the joy, certainty, and completeness that Vanauken highlights are those who have fully conformed themselves to the God in whom perfect harmony, clarity, and integrity is found. We call these Christians the saints. Better still, they can only incarnate these three in their own lives because they reflect the One who incarnates these objective qualities of beauty in Himself by his divine nature, Jesus Christ.
In laying out the blueprint for the Christian life, Jesus emphasizes the beatitude of the “peacemakers” (Matthew 5:9). Peacemakers are the ones who maintain harmony in relationships and creation. This is the real inspiration behind stories of the saints speaking to animals. Saint Francis taming the wolf at Gubbio or preaching to the birds were illustrations of his identity as a peacemaker that brought harmony to creation.
Saint Paul tells the Christians of Thessalonica they “are all children of light, children of the day” (1 Thessalonians 5:5), emphasizing the clarity that is meant to the found in Christians. This reflects Jesus, “the light of the world” (John 8:12), whose light emanates from His divine nature, the source of beauty. We see this light artistically displayed in the nimbuses one finds in sacred art around the heads of saints. Many who had the blessing of interacting with Saint Teresa of Calcutta in person describe a similar light emanating from her. There is actually biblical precedence for this in Exodus 34:29–35. After Moses speaks with God in Mount Sinai, he descends back to camp and is described as shining brightly. This glorification is found later at the Transfiguration of Jesus whose face “shone like the sun” (Matthew 17:2; cf. Matthew 17:1–8; Mark 9:2–8; Luke 9:28–36).
Finally, Jesus speaks to the beauty of integration when he calls upon Christians to “seek first the kingdom” (Matthew 6:33). This radical integrity organizes all the disparate elements on one’s identity around the “one thing needful” that Jesus exhorts in Luke 10:42. It is why Christ was able to focus on the will of his Father as He describes in John 6:38. This is evident in the singular focus of saints that enables their otherworldly productivity in serving God and others as well as building up the kingdom of God that they seek.
These examples illustrate how Christ, and those of Christ’s Body, the Church (see Ephesians 1:22–23; Colossians 1:24), truly “incarnate” the three objective, essential elements of beauty which finds its source in God. We members of that same Church, being the Body of Christ, must seek to incarnate these elements in our own lives in order to point the world to the God who is beauty.
So, will beauty save the world? In a way beauty incarnate already has. But God is not content with saving the world, God wants us to participate in transforming it. We have always made beautiful things not because of the money they make or their survival value, but for their own sake. We make beauty for beauty itself. We cannot help it. We are trying to transform the world into something beautiful and in so doing we make it more like God, who is beauty. Now, with God’s grace, we are called to make beauty not just with stone, color or words, but with ourselves.
Mike Schramm lives in southeastern Minnesota with his wife and seven children. There, he teaches theology and philosophy at Aquinas High School and Viterbo University. He earned his MA in theology from St. Joseph’s College in Maine and an MA in philosophy from Holy Apostles College. He has written for Busted Halo, Homiletic and Pastoral Review, and the Voyage Comics Blog. Read Mike’s other WWNN essays.