A Brief Christian Philosophy of Art and Beauty
Beauty will save the world. - Dostoyevsky
Anything which is intentionally wrought or crafted by the ingenuity and effort of an intelligent being is properly called art. Art, then, is to be distinguished from nature or things that occur as a result or product of natural forces. Nature itself is art, because God made it, but art is never produced by nature. The arts of men are always and necessarily derivative because they depend on the original art of God, who created the universe. What God has made is the material from which men, his image bearers, sub-create. We draw upon his resources to rearrange, shape, and make things which are not already in nature, and these things we make we call art.
Art may also properly refer to the act of creating. In other words, art is both the act of making and also the thing made. In this way we can refer to different kinds of arts, such as the art of carpentry, the art of painting, the art of sculpting, the art of ship building, the art of home building, etc. We may also speak of different categories for the arts, such as fine arts (drawing, painting, sculpting), performing arts (dance, theater, music), practical arts (home building, city planning, furniture crafting).
Art and science are by definition mutually exclusive; that is, they cannot be considered the same thing (but they are also intimately connected). Whereas art requires ingenuity and will to form raw materials into something useful or beautiful—it involves taking dominion over creation and reworking it according to one’s will—science is the opposite. Science is a submissive and receptive endeavor. Science observes what is the case; it pays careful attention to the way things are, things we did not make and cannot alter, and it operates in obedience to objective realities and laws. Mathematics is a science. Physics is a science. Logic is a science. We cannot reshape, cudgel, or abuse multiplication into operating differently than it simply does. Applying our will against the forces of gravity and inertia tends to produce negative effects. “This sentence is either true or false” is necessarily true, even if it makes us mad and we just want to be married bachelors with one ended sticks.
Art is not science and science is not art, but art depends upon science and, to an extent, science depends upon art. Art does not accomplish its purposes without paying obedience to science. The artist who builds a ship must learn and obey scientific truths about buoyancy, mass, water displacement, aerodynamics, etc. The artist who writes a symphony must study number as it moves through time, rhythm, harmony, and what tones are pleasing or discordant to the human ear (or even in auditory range). The artist who builds buildings must observe principles about gravity and geometry so as to make something that will stand upright for a long time and also provide the function desired for living or working. The painter must learn the colors which exist in nature, how to mix them, what is pleasing to the eye, how to transfer what he sees in nature in perspective to his canvas, etc.
Likewise, as any high level mathematician, architect, or scientist will tell you, the higher level sciences require creativity to solve problems. Science provides the rules; human ingenuity and art provide the means by which those rules and truths are tackled and the various ways problems can be solved (or at least attempted). To this day there are elusive difficulties in mathematics and biology and chemistry, etc., which will only ever be solved by an equal valuation of natural law and human ingenuity (art).
Science’s natural aim is truth. Art’s natural aim is beauty. Science and art, working in concert, provide the world with much good. Goodness is mostly concerned with justice and justice is concerned with how we treat our neighbor. What we learn about the world God made, that which simply is, belongs to science and is truth. What we make from the materials in the world which God has made, this is the domain of both usefulness and beauty. Goodness (justice) is dependent upon what we do with truth (science) and art (usefulness and beauty).
The love of God and the love of our neighbor is the whole content of our duty. When we do our duty to God and neighbor we perform the deeds of justice. We have a responsibility to acknowledge the truths of God revealed in nature (science) and to make things that honor God and serve our neighbor well (useful and beautiful things).
Something is useful if it supports human flourishing and Godward praise. That which facilitates the meeting of basic human needs (food, shelter, clothing) or basic human goods (things which tend toward human happiness) are useful. Our knowledge of science and our artful ingenuity is well used when we make useful things. Anything which we make which works against meeting human needs or goods is not useful, it is harmful and should be avoided.
Beauty is something different than usefulness. Beauty can be said to be useful in some ways in that it tends to work towards some other human good. Being around beauty makes people happier. Experiencing sunshine, mountain top views, fine paintings and music, or appreciating the attractiveness of one’s spouse, these are encounters with beauty which produce joy and happiness. In this way, beauty is useful, but beauty is in an important sense “useless.” In other words, we do not produce, collect, or sit before beauty in order to do something else with it. We seek beauty itself as something which is good. We look at a painting, sometimes very long and very often, because it is beautiful and not because we want to use it to accomplish something else. No one takes a beautiful painting and serves pizza upon it.
Beauty, like love, is disinterested. This word, disinterested, can be confusing in today's usage of the term. By disinterested I do not mean to say that we do not find the thing in question “interesting,” but that we do not love it because it serves our own interests. A man truly loves a woman when he wants her for who she is, period. He is not interested in her cooking and cleaning skills, nor does he see her as a mere means to bearing children for him to continue his legacy. A man who loves a woman desires her for her own sake. He might benefit from her partnership in life in many ways, but he is not thinking of what she can do for him, he is thinking of her as she is and he desires her, the woman herself, not what she can do for him. All love—that is, true love—is disinterested. The love of God for man and man’s love of God, insofar as the latter is true love, is not about getting it is about giving oneself over. Love loses itself in its object.
Beauty is the presence of God’s love in the universe. Beauty beckons the soul to forget it exists and to get lost in something other than the self. It is because of this that beauty is antithetical to the modern age of therapeutic self-concern. The turning of our eyes inward, or the baseless collection of material things to simply have before us, to meet our perceived “needs,” these things are what Augustine (and Josef Pieper in turn) have called “the concupiscence of the eyes.” It is not a selfless appreciation of beauty, it is a lust for acquiring things to see for our own fleshly gratification. Pornography is the ultimate form of committing adultery against beauty. It takes what is beautiful, the human form which God has made, and uglifies it into a mere object for self-gratification. It takes that which is to be beheld and loved in ecstasy, in the right context, and makes it cheap, commonplace, and purely carnal.
If one apprehends true beauty as beauty, one must love and therefore one must forget himself in that moment. This is what Longinus (and much later, C. S. Lewis) called “sublime.” Calling something which is truly beautiful merely “pretty” is treasonous to truth. The man who stands on the edge of the ocean and gazes as far as he can into the vanishing point of the horizon as the sun is setting and says to himself, “Oh, that’s okay, but I wish I were home watching the game,” he is broken inside. Sitting under the night’s sky in the middle of nowhere without an ounce of light pollution, or standing atop a mountain and seeing the curvature of the earth, or watching your bride approach you down the aisle, or holding your first newborn baby, etc., these things are sublime. The man of sense and proper sentiment cannot think of himself in those moments, he is not even properly aware he is there because there is just the sublime vision itself.
Beauty is an objective thing. It is not merely in the eye of the beholder. Why then do some people disagree about beauty? I think there are two reasons. For one I think beauty can be participated in by degree. A painting might be beautiful in one aspect, perhaps in symmetry, but not in another, perhaps in color theory. One person who appreciates the symmetry might find it beautiful, but another more sensitive to its use of color might find something about the painting to lack. Since things humans make by our arts don’t always perfectly conform to the laws of beauty it is possible that things we make are only beautiful to a greater or lesser degree. But it seems to me, as in the above examples of oceans, mountains, and starry nights that we see perfect beauty by God, which man only imitates. If a person does not find such things to be truly beautiful, this is not a disagreement due to appreciating and judging different elements of beauty, but this betrays an actual brokenness of judgment within a man.
Man, due to sin, has become a base creature. We have lowered our eyes from the sky and turned them from the shore, and we no longer are in awe of the mountains as we ought. We hide in our homes and we entertain ourselves to death with things of no substance whatsoever and we have all but conceded our humanity to the idols of our age who do our thinking for us. Like the person who has drunk so much cheap booze that he has no ability to discern a fine wine, so the modern man has glutted himself on the world of mere “seeing of things” until all sights are the same to his ruined vision.
But beauty is irrepressible. Beauty breaks through. Beauty is in the crack of sidewalks as dandelions push through, it is in the smile of the newborn baby, it is in the amazing things which man has made and still can make (if we can but find the will to do so). Beauty breaks in upon all of us at one time or another and what we do with it, when we are confronted with it, matters. God uses beauty to invigorate man and draw his eyes upward once again. Beauty has always been God’s plan to draw man up into the divine.
From the beginning we see beauty in the works of God. “And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.” (Genesis 2:9a) Notice the beauty (the Form) of the tree coupled with serving the good (Function) of man. God joined beauty with usefulness and it was good.
Even after man fell from grace through sin, beauty was God’s plan to lead us back to him. Nowhere might this be better seen than in how Yahweh unfolds the gospel to his people Israel, gracefully leading them out of bondage in Egypt, and providing for them a means of coming back into his presence (which they lost in the garden). He gives them instructions on how to build a replica of the heavenly tabernacles by which God made a gateway between heaven and earth, a down payment on the day that all of heaven and all of earth would become one. Yahweh wants his people to understand the beauty of being in relationship with him and he does this by supernaturally enabling two artists to forge a piece of heaven on earth.
The Lord said to Moses, “See, I have called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft. And behold, I have appointed with him Oholiab, the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan. And I have given to all able men ability, that they may make all that I have commanded you: the tent of meeting, and the ark of the testimony, and the mercy seat that is on it, and all the furnishings of the tent, the table and its utensils, and the pure lampstand with all its utensils, and the altar of incense, and the altar of burnt offering with all its utensils, and the basin and its stand, and the finely worked garments, the holy garments for Aaron the priest and the garments of his sons, for their service as priests, and the anointing oil and the fragrant incense for the Holy Place. According to all that I have commanded you, they shall do.” (Exodus 31:1-11)
The holiness of the Lord filled the beauty of the Tabernacle upon its completion and in that moment heaven was beginning to take over the earth. It remains with the people of God to this day, as image bearers and as redeemed and remade people in Christ, to fulfill the mandate given in the beginning to “fill the earth and subdue it.” This mandate has many aspects to it and I do not dare reduce it to just one, but it is not less than this: that man is to form beautiful things and fill the earth with them so as to continue the work of bringing heaven down in little pieces. It will always fall short of the full thing, but it will nevertheless form little gateways to and patches of heaven on earth which can lift the souls of weary and heavy laden men and women who have forgotten how to lift their eyes and behold goodness itself. Beauty will save the world by helping the world forget about itself and to rejoice in the God who is there, the ground of all being, truth, and goodness.
The destiny of this world is to return to beauty. The Book of Revelation ends with the uniting of heaven and earth. In the end (or in the new beginning) Beauty himself comes down to us. “And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.” (Revelation 21:3) All of the ugliness will be wiped away. All the ruins will be repaired. We will dwell in the midst of beauty and we will be beautiful and all that is ugly or base will find no foothold anywhere on this earth ever again.
Beauty beckons us to heaven right now. Will we let it in and let it consume us? Beauty, as God’s love in the world, is about the only safe thing to allow yourself to be consumed by. I don’t recommend it with lions or sports or television and certainly not with vile baseless forms of anti-art, things made by man that harm rather than uphold. Turn your eyes back to the heavens. Make something beautiful to share with others. Create something useful to uplift your fellows. Put to death your love of mere things and look beyond to the world of being itself and lose yourself in love of what is true, good, and beautiful. It will save you from yourself. It will bring you face to face with the Lord of the universe, Jesus Christ.
Further Suggested Reading
The Poetics, by Aristotle
On the Sublime, by Longinus
The Abolition of Man, by C. S. Lewis
The Mind of the Maker, by Dorothy Sayers
Beauty, by Roger Scruton
On the Musically Beautiful, by Edward Hanslick
What is Art?, by Leo Tolstoy
Art and the Bible, by Francis Schaeffer
The God Who is There, by Francis Schaeffer
Editor’s Note: This article is a lightly edited version of the original from Study the Great Books and is republished here with permission.
