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?
Engaging Culture with Culture Through Acts of Creative Excellence
Why Beauty Matters
The following video is the first part of 6 in a BBC special hosted by philosopher Roger Scruton on Beauty, the contemporary world’s apparent rejection of it, and the imminent need for its return. Personally, I am not completely convinced of all his points, but the general arc is salient and thought provoking. I certainly believe capital “B” Beauty is necessary, but Scruton’s Kantian and Neo-Platonism are limiting; these under gird a beauty that exists only in its idealism. To my understanding, the idealistic in beauty (though surely not to be excluded only eschewed as the only end) resulted in the 20th Century’s rejection of that capital “B” Beauty which he vehemently shuns. We often forget that capital “B” Beauty can be found in “ashes and dust, blood and bodies” as well as broken bread and a creation that includes its brokenness. After all, as believers, are we not to find the ultimate Beauty as Christ’s most ghastly sacrifice: macabre, despairing, and gruesome (not in spite of it but because of it)? Still, the essay will stir us to think and there exists plenty in it that speaks to truth and is worth fighting for.
A Working Thesis
The irrelevance of art in the contemporary ethos happened perchance by accident, alas it is so. Reason, science and religion cannot find a place for it except as superfluous, and by them it has been classified into the genera obsolescence. Yet the concept of beauty (a very classical pursuit of art) has been forever linked with truth and goodness throughout the philosophical heritage of every civilization; it is, itself, a transcendental that as humans we are eager to define, quantify and grasp at, but in our modern age, we know it less well then the ancients we have supposedly surpassed in every human faculty. Where as once, it was known as universal, it is now considered subjective; where as once it was considered both inspired and imbued with power to, itself, inspire, it is now a plaything, a fancy, a leisure—ignored. Art once depicting the most powerful symbols of a culture is now produced irreverently hiding behind its every sparse line an increasingly sparse and vapid message. It has fallen from its lofty place beside the other transcendentals; like others, though, who scale towering heights, they (each tied together) succeed or fall as one. So it is that these three (Truth, Goodness and Beauty) have all become whimsical fancies, and have lost the potency to carry any lasting messages; by Fact they are slain, sterile though it is, humane perhaps, they headless bow to the every compounding, shifting, competing fact. Fallen. First beauty, then truth and goodness. All fallen; the loss of beauty a mortal wound that cannot be borne.