The Wound of Beauty

We have taken a brief look at truth and goodness and some of the challenges we encounter with each.

Our next difficulty arises in many forms across many domains. We find her in stories, in poems, in nature, in sunsets, in the night sky, in art and in music. She is beauty.

She has a way of bypassing our reason and going straight for our heart, seizing it with awesome strength.

She sometimes whispers and sometimes screams that there is more and leaves us longing for it. She raises questions about what we are and why we feel the way we do in her presence, yet she will not provide us with the answers.

She is “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

Her rapturous power awakens something within us.

For what?

Stranger still, she seems to somehow work in and come out of us in the best of our own creations.

In this, she leaves us wondering if the beautiful piece of music or art or mathematical equation was a creation or a discovery, or somehow both.

Her existence, as we find it, is puzzling. It is wildly unnecessary. It's rather easy to see how we could have lived satisfied had we never met her in any form. But having seen her, we find that we cannot bear to live without her.

Why is that, and where did she come from?

Once again, Christianity provides a compelling framework with rich insights into these questions.

God, who says he ‘dwells in the beauty of holiness,’ is ultimately the source of: (1) the beauty we find ‘out there’ in the world, (2) our desire for beauty and ability to apprehend and appreciate it, and (3) our ability to create beauty as a direct consequence of being made in his likeness (in the image of God, the ultimate source of beauty).

Moreover, the beauty found and created in this world has an enriched purpose. It is not merely for our passing pleasure, which is never fully satisfied by it, but ultimately is a sign post pointing to something greater— to someone greater. As C.S. Lewis said in the quote I shared above, “[beauty in this world is] the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited,” and it is meant to produce in us a longing for that country. Beauty has a role to play in teaching and drawing us to goodness and truth.

We have now looked (albeit briefly) at Truth, Goodness and Beauty. That classic triad which constitutes what Ernest Dimnet called "what we live by" in his book by that title. In every case, Christianity sheds light on and greatly assists us in our pursuit of and participation in these deeply intertwined transcendentals.

The truth, goodness and beauty I find in the world... the way in which we experience them. The devastating weight of their opposites at certain times and places, and our experience of that.

These cry out for an explanation, and not one that is merely analytical or causal, but also practical and immanent. I have never found anything capable of doing that so naturally and wonderfully as Christianity. It makes sense of the best and worst parts of our world and shows the way away from the latter and toward the source of the former.

In my next post, I'll share some of the reasons we have for thinking Christianity is true. For if it is not true, it cannot be good and its beauty is ultimately superficial.