Andrew's Annotations and Anecdotes

Evangelical Christians are not, in general, renowned for having great love of aesthetics or for being defenders of beauty. Quite the opposite in fact. Our buildings can be austere and frequently even ugly. The evangelical tendency is to activism - and time, effort and money spent on physical beauty seems to most evangelicals to have a whiff of worldliness about it.

Enter Elaine Scarry. She is not a Christian, or at least certainly not an evangelical. Scarry works as Walter M Cabot Professof of Aesthetics at Harvard University. On Beauty is more of an extended essay than a book, weighing in at 134 small pages with large margins!

Scarry takes on a thesis that most evangelicals would, I suspect, be inclined to agree with. It goes (in my paraphrase!) like this... Since there is so much injustice in the world shoildn't we stop faffing around with aesthetics and spend our time and energy campaigning for justice?

Scarry argues that this line of argument is at best incoherent and that, in fact, "it may even be the case that far from damaging our capacity to attend to problems of injustice, [beauty] instead intensifies the pressure we feel to repair existing injustices."

Essentially her argument is that, far from leading us to pay attention to beautiful things for their own sake the natural outworking of beauty is "to give rise to the notion of distribution, to a lifesaving reciprocity, to fairness not just in the sense of loveliness of aspect but in the sense of "a symmetry of everyone's relation to one another."

I won't rehearse the whole essay here. Suffice to say that it is exquisitely drafted and quite compelling in its own terms.

But I think that a Christian has an even better reason to believe in the power of beauty. Beauty, the Christian knows, exists both visibly and invisibly. It is seen both in physical form - a wonderful flower, a graceful woman, a stunning building - and in the moral beauty of God and of people when acting in line with God's character. Since both physical and nonphysical beauty are part of God's creation Christians are not at liberty to despise the former and love only the latter.

Instead we ought to see a relationship between them. Sure in our world they are not perfectly matched; many of the physically beautiful people in our world are far less morally beautiful than those of us endowed with merely average (or below) looks! But the existence of the visible beauties is a reminder of the existence of other virtues as well. Whilst there is, without a doubt, a subjective aspect to beauty (one persons taste does not precisely match another's) the undeniably objective nature of beauty; the fact that people gather round to look at a Monet painting or an Adam fireplace or a woman on a Pirelli calendar - points to the existence of a reality outside ourselves. Where does this beauty and our sense of it come from? Well, of course, the Bible reader knows that it is placed in our creation to point us to the God who made us. "The heavens declare the glory of the Lord."

Christians should appreciate beauty. It is not to be worshipped; but it is a reflection of the God who created everything beautiful and it is, therefore, to point us to worship and adore him.