In an excerpt from her new Stand to Reason University course “Beauty: The Art of War,” Megan Almon explores the nature and defining qualities of beauty, showing why it cannot simply be in the eye of the beholder.
Transcript
The Catholic professor John-Mark Miravalle wrote, “Nobody is ever turned off by beauty. Beauty is, by definition, engaging, appealing, delightful. But people are regularly turned off by other people talking about beauty. Beauty and the experience of beauty are so exquisite and personal that talking about them can seem to ruin them.”
In this course, I’m going to risk talking about beauty. My hope is that the course will primarily be an experience that stirs and reawakens your imagination to beauty, and that you will learn important things about it along the way.
In that spirit, this is a different kind of apologetic. Perhaps more an appeal than an argument, more music than math. Though, like beauty, goodness, and truth, math and music stream forth from the same beautiful source.
In the early 1990s, the city of Sarajevo was known as the “Balkan Jerusalem.” It was a city of high culture that celebrated the arts. It was home to art museums, a symphony hall, and a national library full of historical treasures. When Bosnia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1992, the Bosnian Serbs retaliated and laid siege to Sarajevo. The city lies in a valley, so the Serbs attacked from the mountains all around it. Each day, they fired mortar shells, sometimes hundreds, into the city. Snipers picked off people in the streets.
The siege of Sarajevo holds the record for the longest siege on a capital city in modern warfare, lasting from April of 1992 to February of 1996.
One morning during the siege, several grenades exploded in front of a bakery, killing twenty-two people waiting to buy bread and injuring more than a hundred others. The incident was reported globally. The next morning, Vedran Smailović, the principal cellist in the Bosnian Orchestra, donned a tuxedo and carried his cello to the site of the massacre. He sat amidst the rubble, and he began to play.
He returned to the site for twenty-two consecutive days—one day for each victim. With each return, he risked being caught in a sniper’s crosshairs. With news and camera crews all throughout the city, the world watched and listened as Vedran’s cello wept. People were surprised, confused, conflicted. They simply didn’t have a category for Vedran’s actions in the midst of devastation. But I think I know what he was doing. He was fighting back with beauty. This was Vedran’s act of defiance, his own declaration of war on all that was broken and dying around him. It was as if he declared to his enemies, “You can do your worst. You can kill and break and burn it to the ground, but you can never touch this.”
We live in a time and place where beauty is believed to be in the eye of the beholder—purely subjective, ornamental, a luxury, impractical. But understand, if something is purely subjective, it’s not really real. But Vedran knew that beauty is real. Not only is it real; it’s vital to human flourishing.
In this session, we will discuss the nature of beauty as an objective part of reality, and we’ll look at the attributes that beautiful things share. Spoiler alert: There’s more to beauty than the definitions can offer us.
When we talk about beauty, we are hanging out in a subdivision of philosophy called aesthetics. Those who study aesthetics, like the late, great Roger Scruton, understand that while beauty is something, it’s not some thing. It’s real, but it’s not a particular physical thing.
Most people, when asked, “What is beauty?” answer with a noun. Beauty is a flower in bloom. Beauty is a mountain sunrise. Beauty is a newborn baby. And on and on it goes. Now, I’m in favor of metaphors, but after a while, it gets confusing, and it leaves us asking, well, which one of those things is beauty? Better to think about beauty as an aspect of reality, like truth or goodness, its transcendental siblings. Some have called it truth’s radiance, others the window through which we see truth and goodness, still others the child of the marriage of truth and goodness. But we know through simple reflection that it can’t simply be in the eye of the beholder.
C.S. Lewis made the point that beauty can’t be reduced to one’s feelings in an example he wrote about in The Abolition of Man. When you encounter something truly beautiful—in the case of his example, a waterfall—it doesn’t just give you beautiful feelings. Lewis said, “The feelings which make a man call an object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of veneration. If This is sublime is to be reduced at all to a statement about the speaker’s feelings, the proper translation would be I have humble feelings.” Lewis understood that when the man in his example gazed upon the waterfall, it made him feel small—insignificant. Beauty was an objective attribute of the waterfall.
Christians are not the only ones who understand that beauty is objective. The ancient Greeks thought so, too. Plato called beautiful things copies or shadows of the perfect, divine world. He understood that for beauty to be real, it had to come from somewhere beyond us—a transcendent source. He didn’t ground beauty in God’s nature as we do, but he recognized it as something woven into the fabric of reality.
Christian aestheticists—those philosophers who study beauty—believe that because God made all that is, everything that exists possesses at least some beautiful qualities, even if it is barely discernible. Many have offered definitions of beauty. Thomas Aquinas defined it very simply as “that which, when being seen, pleases.” In other words, you recognize beauty when you encounter it—when you sense it. He did offer defining attributes that beautiful things share—unity, balance, especially with regard to proportion and harmony, and what he called a radiance of form. Let’s look at each of those.
As for unity, beautiful things are unified in their form and content. Form and content are the two necessary components for any work of art. This means that most beautiful things possess a kind of simplicity that has to do with completeness. There isn’t anything unnecessary or extra about them, and they aren’t missing anything.
Beautiful things are balanced in their proportion. For example, when you walk into a beautiful cathedral, your eye is typically drawn to the front, where something like a cross is larger than the things around it, but appropriately so.
Additionally, beautiful things are harmonious. We most often think of harmony in relation to music. Many philosophers call music the highest form of art because when you hear beautiful music, you can actually hear the harmonies that are not being played. But harmony simply means that each part of a beautiful thing brings out the best in all of the other parts. So, you could have harmony in nature, architecture, visual arts, relationships—even in meals.
Finally, beautiful things possess a radiance of form. You could also call this a divine spark—something that radiates from them that is undeniable. That’s why you know it when you see it. It captivates.
In the fall in Colorado, I sit on my deck overlooking a stunning mountain lake, and my eyes are often drawn upward to the aspen trees in my yard. Right around that time of year, they turn from bright green to an even brighter yellow, and there’s a small window of time before they drop to the ground when they are ever so brittle. The wind hits them, and they flutter like a million yellow butterflies, making the most lovely rustling sound. In those moments, I can’t tear my attention from those aspen trees. I am transfixed. Maybe you’ve had moments like that—moments when you recognize the radiance of form in a person, a place, or a thing.
Jonathan Edwards, the theologian, adds other attributes, like symmetry, to his definition. I recall an animated conversation years ago between a professor and students in the Summit Ministries gap year program that my husband and I directed. They argued whether or not the Grand Canyon, which they had recently visited, could be described as beautiful. The professor, who insisted that students learn to use their words carefully, challenged them with the claim that the canyon was not symmetrical, nor was it well ordered in terms of proportion. The conversation left everyone thinking, as was his intention, but they concluded with the concession that, though the Grand Canyon possesses many attributes of beauty, better words to describe it might be “magnificent” or “majestic.”
Conversations about beauty, like that one, have gone on for centuries. Part of the problem is that it’s hard to pin “beauty” down. Definitions fail to satisfy many details about beauty that are difficult to explain.
In this session, we’ve highlighted the importance of beauty and argued that it cannot just be in the eye of the beholder, but is an objective aspect of reality. We looked at some of its defining attributes, which helps us think more carefully about whether the things we encounter are more beautiful or less beautiful.
In the next session, we’ll discuss the mysteries of beauty. Why, for example, do the definitions barely seem to scratch the surface? Why does it have psychological effects that we can’t fully explain? How can beauty help lead us to the reality of God’s existence?
I’ll see you in session two.