Beauty is passé. It is kitsch. It is to be avoided. So say the modernist artist and the postmodernist philosopher. Take Gilles Deleuze who says of beauty that it is irrelevant and in actuality a lie—an obfuscation of the univocity of the supreme truth of chaos, or as Jacob Rogozinski writes the “supreme order” found only in primal Chaos (a perversion, for sure, of Aristotelian wisdom). Enter Hans Rookmaaker and Francis Schaeffer—their raised voices, together, decried this flight from classical forms of beauty, toward the nihilism they pronounced inherent in all forms of abstraction. It is their voices that we still hear and which overwhelmingly shape the tenor of the contemporary Christian aesthetic; the one in which Marcel Duchamp, his Dadaists, the surrealists, the cubists, and the abstract expressionists are all rejected as anarchic, dehumanizing, immoral and bereft of beauty. In so much, beauty in Christian culture is understood to be best exemplified as anything pre-modern; therefore, in this Christian economy, Caravaggio is unquestionably superior to Mark Rothko and any landscape painting, ala Thomas Kinkade, is indisputably more excellent than Picasso’s Guernica. Certainly, Rookmaaker and Schaeffer were at least fractionally right in their concern over the artist as provocateur intent on destabilizing the moral and true (consider Serrano’s Piss Christ) and rightfully afraid of the Derridean and Deleuzean themes such as unconditional freedom, erasure, absence and chance (leading to an absolute dissolution of transcendence), which permeate the intention of much of modern art. But as Christians have defined beauty, so, too, might the modernist elite find vindication for their rejection of it; for the Christian churchmen appears attracted to beauty only in its burlesque. Nevertheless, the modern artist has not found complete escape. Many modern pieces are both transcendent as well as beautiful even if not classically so; the problem lies, then, in the limitations both sides have placed on the category of beauty: what constitutes it and what is allowed under its nomenclature, and both sides seemingly display ignorance as it turns to the nature of beauty. Therefore, I find it necessary to ask and resolve the question: What, then, is beauty?

To start let’s consider the current state of beauty—on the one side much maligned and discarded, on the other side wanting, at its best. Why so? For very different reasons but the same root cause: a distinction made between it and the sublime first with Longinus in his treatise, On the Sublime (1^st C. AD) and culminating with Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The sublime is that which is so immense, grand or incalculable that it seemingly surpasses our own capacity to grasp or understand it and even escapes any attempt to represent it; instead, it exists only formless as thought. Beauty, on the other hand, is something ordinary—an aesthetical assessment properly applied to a common “coat, house or flower”[i]. The Kantian or Hegelian devotee marks the sublime as provocation to thought leading to pure reason—a triumphal mastery over the mystery of the unknown—and beauty, a simple trifling, incontrovertibly inferior (inferred in Critique of Judgment by terms like play and subjective universality) to the sublime. From this we arrive at the current perception of beauty as “the pretty, the merely decorative, or the inoffensively pleasant.”[ii] So, too, do postmodern assemblies wish to break from beauty, which requires embodiment—an obvious burr to sustaining their own disbelief in some unifying order. They, therefore, contend beauty is a subterfuge concocted to suppress the truth of the primordial nothing, the complete mystery of the veil and the resultant unknowability of anything transcendent. Thus beauty is discarded, and the objective (consider order or form—classically attributed to beauty—rather than absolutism) along with it, by association (all the more easily since it is trivial to begin with). Hence, in order to elevate reason or unseat it, the beautiful must first be diminished—reduced to kitsch—lest anyone be distracted from the fact of sola-thought (belief in belief itself); whether it be maddening chance—in all of its alterity, conceived but never grasped—or the rigor of reason leading to a comprehensive metanarrative.

Christians should recognize (but too often don’t) the dilemma resulting from a framework founded on beauty’s demise or marginalization; for the claim of its authenticity depends on the unrepresentable God who became representable as a supreme act of beauty. Instead, western Christianity follows the course of the Enlightenment placing its primary emphasis on biblical exposition, systematic theologies and God (or the sublime) as primarily resident and accessible only in reason and contemplation; it habitually considers beauty and art only as each might play its demure but second-class supporting role as illustrative, possessing no value in and of itself and dangerous if not pedagogical. In so doing, modern Christianity has affirmed the Enlightenment ontology of man as mind on a stick rather than the more expansive biblical definition: mind, body and spirit.[iii] In fact, a Christian Enlightenment mentality has somehow conjoined mind and spirit and set them collectively opposed to the embodied. The common expression, sacred and secular, is its most frequent manifestation, and I believe is very much tied to the severance of the sublime from the beautiful. But embodiment matters! Mainly because as C. S. Lewis reminds us, we are amphibians and in so much biphasic: both material and immaterial. So, it is that art and things are beautiful primarily because they remind us in some small way of the reality of the immaterial (by means of the material). Therefore, sublimity and beauty must be reunified. For it is through form that we engage the unknowable, to do so we must journey outside of the critical texts that have caused its bifurcation. Ergo philosophy and aesthetics aside, we’ll consider the biblical term glory: a term often used to describe majesty, much like Longinus describes the sublime, but also synonymous with beauty, a word otherwise and mysteriously lacking from Holy Scripture (but not in conceptualization only in its orthography), but where it does appear in either form, we’ll find additional characteristics meant to broaden the meaning of the term, and in so much exceed the fashionable but diminutive definition: decorative excess; we’ll find that beauty always points to something greater than itself, and often to something, otherwise, intangible.

Glory, by looking at the Psalms, is a term that seems to encroach on all three of the philosophical transcendentals: truth, goodness and beauty; Donald McGilchrist tells us that when considering sets of three, Christians should not neglect a comparison to the Trinity. Doing so, he describes the intersection likewise: the truth of the Spirit, the goodness of the Father and the beauty of the Incarnate Son. It is beauty that is embodied; it is beauty that is manifestation,[iv] and it is beauty that exists as a pointer to reveal truth and goodness by means of its physical attractiveness—or rather some analogical quality that both invites while urging one to respond to some ideal. Kant tells us in Critique of Pure Reason that we experience and come to know things only through space and time; it is of utmost importance, then, that the transcendent God (transcendent to what? Space and time) becomes tangible and embodied. The person of Christ is, therefore, critical to any complete Christian aesthetic[v] or epistemology, for that matter; He is the pattern by which the amphibious is best observed. He describes himself as a door—not so far removed from the Orthodox tradition of icon as a window into heaven. Beauty always speaks to something other than itself. Even in its apparent baroque-like excesses; where it does not prefigure opulence, but goodness in its ideal state—inviting, generous and replete with the promise of some ontological satisfaction. Consider the psalm, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”[vi] Note the value in sumptuousness rather than scarcity. As if, some repudiation of a neo (or proto)-Manichaeism has always been necessary, and, as if, the representable (all that can be fondled, sniffed, savored, heard or scrutinized) has value beyond its agreeability but never in spite of it; how else can the goodness of God be intimated (certainly not through treatise or sermonizing)?

Looking deeper at beauty (or glory, or splendor, or majesty or awe), we find a breathtaking gamut of definitions determined by philosophers since Plato, though never assembled collectively (and in many cases discarded in part or whole by subsequent thinkers): order, idealness, simplicity, unity, divinity, pleasure, passion and the introspective. Who am I to deny any of these? In fact, I believe glory and biblical beauty make room for each of them, but I do wish to allow the Psalms to, also, expand them. But first let us consider what the Psalms say about God Himself as beautiful (curious that we understand Him to be truth and goodness but often forget the third transcendental, as a result marginalizing its value and that part of God along with it):

I have asked one thing from the Lord; it is what I desire:
to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
gazing on the beauty of the Lord
and seeking Him in His temple.[vii]

It is God’s beauty that draws the psalmist to the Himself, resulting in such an abundant overflow that the psalmist can often be heard thusly:

Sing a new song to the Lord;
sing to the Lord, all the earth.
Sing to the Lord, praise His name;
proclaim His salvation from day to day.
Declare His glory among the nations,
His wonderful works among all peoples.
Splendor and majesty are before Him;
strength and beauty are in His sanctuary.[viii]

Such that beauty begets beauty: song from God’s glory before us (much like Aristotle’s concept of art as mimetic). This begs the question of the spiritual health of those who do not crave, create or are enrapt by the beautiful (is God to them underwhelming; if so, how then can they desire after His kingdom). Beauty overflows from God and exists because He exists. It is inspired by Him, and when it is found, it always points back to Him. Just as Christ says, “If you know me you know my Father too.”[ix]

To continue, the Psalms tell us that beauty takes various other shapes and can be found in concrete expressions of power[x], truth[xi], creativity[xii], wonder & mystery[xiii], justice[xiv], the infinite[xv] (or sublime), goodness[xvi], joy[xvii] (even its negative, lament, in that it acknowledges the absence of the ideal state), hope[xviii], mercy[xix], as well as kindness[xx] in all its forms. And as is the case with joy and lament, so, too, can each of the others speak to beauty through the via negativia; for beauty always deals in the relationships between things often crossing the chasm separating the real from the ideal state[xxi] as a form of resistance to imperfection in an attempt to create an alternative reality or affect a yearning for it.[xxii] What is important to note in all of this, is that beauty has density. It is a shape with mass and not just a flimsy surface; rather it is a surface through which we see something on the other side. But the surface is required; power cannot be known without some action, truth without a particular or goodness through absence. When these are displayed, there we find beauty. Accordingly, when art attempts to reveal the chaotic truth of a muddled world, or display the power of a symbol, or even attacks the power of a symbol, or shows novelty even through whimsy, it can potentially be classified as beautiful despite its apparent lack of prettiness or the form it takes.

So, looking again at art both the distinctively Christian and the unapologetically modern with the clarity of new eyes—carrying a fresh definition—we might be able to comprehend the thesis that it is notably abandoned in the kitsch and not, as is the common opinion, in an embrace of abstraction; that as Mark Rothko attempted to uncover the truth of the infinite in his iconic paintings or as Picasso demonstrated the injustice and inhumanity perpetrated by German bombers over the Spanish city of Guernica, each navigated their canvases with compasses set to true north: the Judeo-Christian sensitivity to beauty—perhaps unaware themselves they were doing so, but dealing in its currency, nonetheless: the former drawn to an inexplicable vastness and the latter lamenting the injustice of modern warfare. In Daniel Siedell’s essay Embodying Transcendence: Material Spirituality in Contemporary Art,[xxiii] we are given many more such examples then the two I’ve proposed; his book is a considerate, Christian challenge to Schaeffer and his views on modern art. Schaeffer’s adherents demand realism; there is nothing inherently wrong with realism. Historically, the artistic tradition is rich with it, and it has added much to beauty—neither is its well exhausted. But what most Christian artists present today is representation only at the surface, and it is often so flimsy that it mocks the glory we’ve just discussed. As a result passion suffers, and those for whom it is made are steeped in apathy. At best this art is pleasant and adequate hung over a barcalounger; for it is storyboard art that produces only ambivalence; and lacks the creativity and power to foster hope, induce goodness, reveal the infinite, spur a passion to mercy, or a love of truth. Rather, art should exist to collapse the boundary between the sacred and secular; it should be an opportunity to realize that “all actions are liturgical and all artifacts sacraments” and provide a goading to understand how it is possible to make a Eucharistic reality out of all of nature.[xxiv] The often-derided Duchamp, with his readymades, in a certain, sense, comprehends this reality much better than his Christian counterparts. Take for instance the infamous Head of Christ by Warner Sallman, which points to nothing beyond its surface and is every bit as small as Kantian beauty ever was imagined; personally, I’d sooner display R. Mutt’s Fountain; why? Because it implies that an object is not just an object. May be little more, but at least on the right track.

Whether or not beauty is to be preserved or discarded is a question that must be preceded by another: whether or not the current definition is even adequate. As it stands, we experience no loss to lose it; but the real travesty is that beauty has been denuded of its power. What is disputed appears as nothing more than ravenous dogs before a worthless scrap. Instead, a rescue mission must be mounted to resurrect beauty from frivolity. What’s at risk is our ability to know and crave the divine presence; for it is hidden behind a veil unless we have doors and windows to see it, and those doors are always through the “material immanence of [and in] the world.”[xxv] Plato conferred a prophetic calling to the artist. May be it is right to say that the artist can preach, but the expectation of the artist nowadays is far less lofty—almost buffoonery, reduced to a court jester whose accomplishments are for nothing more than amusement. But what the artist can do is provide us tangible representations of God’s power, truth, creativity, wonder, justice, immeasurability, goodness, joy, mercy, and beneficent love—God’s glory and beauty.  Alas, the current state! But beauty doesn’t easily succumb; it persists despite all intentionality to eradicate it. It exists in places most Christians deny, but such is the case with God in His omnipresence—observed when beauty is allowed to flourish in all its originality and glory because all beauty points back to God. What stands in the way of its flourishing is the status quo: the inept definition we’ve all accepted. What’s left, then, is to embrace beauty in the totality of its significance—finally finding revelation as it was meant to be: God affirming, fully and holistically experienced and in no nook or cranny entirely missing.

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[i] Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. pg. 37.

[ii] Hart, David Bentley. Beauty and the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. pg. 15.

[iii] Matt 22:37, Mark 12:30, Luke 10:27

[iv] For an excellent, non-philosophical unpacking of the ultimate expression of beauty as an act of goodness, or sacrifice, see Makoto Fujimura’s stirring article: Fallen Towers and the Art of Tea, which can be found in Refractions pg. 43, or online from Image Journal.

[v] Siedell, Daniel A.. God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art. pg. 65-66.

[vi] Psalm 34:8

[vii] Psalm 27:4

[viii] Psalm 96:1-3 & 6

[ix] John 8:19

[x] Psalm 29:3; Psalm 29:9; Psalm 45:3; Psalm 49:16; Psalm 63:2; Psalm 96; Psalm 102:15; Psalm 104:1-4; Psalm 145:11

[xi] Psalm 19:1-4

[xii] Psalm 19; Psalm 139:13-6

[xiii] Psalm 72:18-19; Psalm 78:11b-12; Psalm 97:2-3 & 6

[xiv] Psalm 96; Psalm 97

[xv] Psalm 104:31

[xvi] Psalm 64:10

[xvii] Psalm 16:9; Psalm 149:5

[xviii] Psalm 106:5

[xix] Psalm 3:3; Psalm 79:9; Psalm 84:11; Psalm 108; Psalm 113

[xx] Psalm 96:1-3

[xxi] Hart. Beauty and the Infinite. pg. 20.

[xxii] Siedell. pg. 30.

[xxiii] Ibid. pg. 71.

[xxiv] Ibid. pg 140.

[xxv] Ibid. pg. 32.

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