Toward a Theology of Beauty and Aesthetics

Sunset in Rachel, NV

My introduction to the philosophical notion of beauty probably came—as I suspect it has for a number of others—from Romantic poet John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The poem’s final line reads: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”¹ Being some kind of subspecies of Platonist, I tend to think that Keats is, to one degree or another, correct in his assessment. To what degree, however, I am unsure. I find the either/or of questions like “is beauty subjective or objective” difficult to muddle through, and tend to swing in either direction depending on my mood of the day. I really go out of my way to avoid being wishy-washy, and I tend to live my life in black-and-white, either/or terms. But when it comes to my thinking, the lines seem to blur a bit. Those words could very well be the most narcissistic thing I have ever written. But, in the words of the late Brennan Manning, I find that I am often a “bundle of paradoxes” when it comes to these sorts of philosophical quandaries. I suppose there is something to say for being honest and self-aware.

Of one thing concerning beauty, I am sure: beauty has saved me more than once. I never had the luxury of a dramatic conversion experience. I came to Christ having been rescued in a thousand small and unsexy ways, saved more from myself than from some exterior thing—saved by things that captured my imagination rather than my head or my heart, to use a clichéd dichotomy. Saved by stories, by characters like James Bond, Batman, Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, and Darth Vader; or, more precisely, saved through them. They were not the architects of my faith, to be sure. But they were certainly part of the foundation. It took me some years to realize that the parts of me those characters captured were parts that the Holy Spirit tends to capture in each and every human being on the long and winding road toward salvation, that these things were intrinsically linked to notions of beauty and aesthetics because they appealed to the imagination. Because of these things, the question I would primarily like to deal with here concerns the relevance of beauty to the human understanding of the nature of God. My thesis is simple: a comprehension of beauty is the means by which the Holy Spirit woos us to Christ and conforms us to his image.

Beauty: A Definition

Returning to Keats’s poem provides an interesting, if somewhat unorthodox, starting point. The notion of beauty as truth is a bit abstract, however, and requires some fleshing out. Enter the Platonic notion of beauty as the “splendor of the truth.” While this helps to add some color to a working definition, it is C. S. Lewis who puts the finer point on things. If the Platonic notion of beauty as the splendor of truth is to be accepted, and it does seem to be presupposed in Lewisian thought, then beauty, being “splendor,” is that which provokes a sense of longing for the truth. To be a bit more precise, beauty is what appeals to eros.

Eros

Modern Christian thought is frequently dominated by hardline dichotomies, sometimes appropriate, at other times belabored and unnecessary. The juxtaposition of eros against agape, I believe, falls into the latter category. The predominant notion of eros as a vile, egocentric kind of lustful love with sexual overtones can be traced back primarily to the Swedish Lutheran theologian Anders Nygren and his seminal treatise Agape and Eros. In this work, Nygren argues that eros, an egocentric type of love, is the born rival of agape, which is a love that is completely other-focused and, therefore, the godlier of the two.² And this seems to be the dominant reading of eros in Christian circles today.

Lewis, interestingly, wastes little time banishing this reductionist thought. Eros is not something to be shuttered out, according to Lewis. On the contrary, eros is a necessary element of the human being precisely because of this notion of beauty. Nygren’s error in thought, Lewis would argue, is in conflating sexual infatuations and lust with eros. Lewis, relying on the Platonic definition of beauty as the splendor of the truth, refutes this idea by pointing out that eros can have a sexual aspect, though the sexual aspect is not necessary for one’s eros to be engaged.³ Eros has more to do with desires—what we millennials call "passions"—and the objects of one's desires, than it does with the raw heat of sexuality (which Lewis bifurcates from eros by denoting as Venus). More to do with the deepest, abiding loves and affections of one's own life, the objects out of which one draws self-fulfillment in the experience of loving, than the mere whims of one's infatuations.

Eros Stimulated

I agree wholeheartedly with Lewis on this point. Having read Nygren’s work, I can understand the juxtaposition he makes, but his argument is just nowhere near as nuanced as it should be. The fact of the matter is, if every human being appealed only and always to agape love, the world would likely devolve into a mass of Batmen. That is, people who constantly give of themselves to their own detriment, people who eventually come to be singularly defined by their pain, and cope with it only by spending themselves into oblivion, without a shred of the ruthless kind of self-reflection necessary to keep on the straight and narrow. The truth is that even agape can become twisted, if not appropriately balanced with a healthy amount of erotic (used in the Lewisian sense of the word, not to denote sexual tension) stimulation.

To put it another way, there have been times when reading a certain book, or watching a certain movie, I have walked away feeling enraptured. The sensation is a bit like having a crush, though clearly less physical, but certainly along the same lines of having my emotional interest engaged. The point Lewis rightly makes is that the reason the emotions are stimulated similarly in both instances, is because it is the same aspect of the human being that is being stimulated; in other words, in both situations, one's eros is being provoked. To illustrate: there are times when I read Scripture that I walk away captivated by the story told and the characters inside those stories—eros stimulated. There is a reason the hideous language of “dating Jesus” has become too often used in the church today, and certain worship songs might as well be aped from high school love letters written to one’s romantic interest. While I despair at the shallowness, there is a kind of point being grasped at in both instances, a desire for one’s deepest longings to be fulfilled, for an ultimate object of affection, for one's eros to be stimulated.

The late David Foster Wallace, in his seminal address to Kenyon College students entitled "This Is Water," illustrated beautifully what is at stake when we ignore eros. "In the day-to-day trenches of adult life," says Wallace, "there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship." Be it money. Be it power. Be it sex. These things, Wallace suggests, will eat you alive. In other words, your affections run back at you. You are what you eat. You become what you love. You reflect what you worship. The object of your affections is the key here, unless you've cracked the secret and can make all desires up and disappear (unlikely, I'll wager). The benefit of the religious experience, then, is in framing the object of one's desires as a being that is wholly other than oneself and one's petty wants. It directs one to look "out there" for the fulfillment of longing, rather than "in here," a truly radical notion that upends all the sentimental fortune cookie wisdom that's been handed out to me by well-meaning teachers and family members who've told me to "dream big" and "look inside and follow your heart." And the only religion that puts capital on this like no other is Christianity because of this insane notion that lies at the heart of the Christian faith—that God became man in the person of Jesus Christ, with whom Christians, through faith, are united in His death and resurrection, so that we rest our hope on the promise that we, too, will be raised up from death at the end of all things.

This, according to Lewis, is the function of beauty—to provoke one’s desires and longings toward Truth himself. And this is a necessary component of the salvation experience. Knowledge alone does not bring one to salvation; there must be some element of conviction out of which is born the true confession of faith for a Christian, that “Jesus is Lord” and that God raised him from the dead (Rom. 10:9-10). Simply stating that Christ is Lord is not enough; the story must be believed, a story that is simultaneously cosmic in scope and astoundingly intimate, that tells us we humans are broken and in need of a Savior, and that Savior has come in the form of Jesus Christ. This confession then is less a cerebral rehearsing of facts; it is actually the cry of one’s deepest longings to have one's desires rightly reoriented toward the One who defines what is beautiful and good (as God does during the creation in the earliest chapters of Genesis).

Beauty in the Salvation Experience

If, then, the confession of Christ as Lord is born from the desire to have one’s longings rightly reoriented, the question becomes: what prompts one to have the desire in the first place? Any theologian worth his or her salt will point out the disturbing reality of Romans 3:23, that all humans have sinned and continually fall short of God’s glory, and, as a result, according to Ephesians 4, all whose hearts are unrepentant (i.e., do not long to have their desires rightly reoriented) continue on with darkened minds. Being the good Calvinistic dispensational presuppositionalist that I am (bundle of paradoxes, remember?), I tend to take quite literally the notion that faith is itself a gift from God (Eph. 2:8), a result of God’s act of predestination toward all those whom he has chosen to receive it (Rom. 8-9).

Therefore, I believe that the Holy Spirit must first illuminate the darkened mind of an unrepentant sinner before that sinner may come to faith. How? Through the stimulation of eros—through beauty. The choice of words in Scripture is interesting when describing the notion of how the elect come to Christ. In John 6:44, Jesus himself describes the process as a kind of “drawing,” not a forcing of the will. But a wooing, of sorts; a (for lack of better wording) courtship, or romancing of the spirit.

I had a crush on Dana Scully before I ever took to liking Jesus as a real person. But Scully, a fictional character in Chris Carter’s groundbreaking television series, The X-Files, is a skeptic who still manages to hold onto her faith. Darth Vader was the most feared man in that galaxy far, far away. But even that dark tyrant was not too far gone, and had the capacity to recognize his mistakes, though it cost him his life, a literal dying of the self in order to do the right thing. Scully’s faith, Vader’s sacrifice, the list goes on. All of the facets of these characters who captured my imagination I would come to find colored in brighter, more perfect hues in the person and teachings of Jesus Christ. My fascinations and imaginings even as far back as my childhood—unbeknownst to me at the time, but oh so clear in hindsight—were the ways in which I was being drawn, the ways in which my spirit was being romanced, my eros stimulated, my longings provoked toward Truth himself.

As I have grown older and talked with more Christians, I have learned that the dramatic encounter with Christ that I myself had long hoped for and even envied in others is not the normative salvation experience. It turns out that every Christian I have ever met, every last one of them, has undergone some kind of experience like the one described above. Sure, some people have those legendary conversion stories, with all the bells and whistles and pyrotechnics. But behind all that dramatic flair is something more primal, something quieter and more even-keeled, common to all who have encountered that strange and wonderful man who can make death itself begin to work backwards. They were never pressured into a proclamation of faith, but drawn to Christ through their longings, through a coming to terms with the fact that their desires were misaligned, and needed to be recalibrated. I found myself profoundly changed—and very much relieved of many disappointments with the divine—when I finally came to understand Psalm 37:4, in which the LORD is said to give those who delight in him the desires of their heart, to mean not that he grants one’s petty wants (I'm still waiting on a million bucks to fall out of the sky and land on my doorstep), but that desire itself would run in a different direction, and that the literal, ultimate object of one’s desire would be reoriented. And the great truth of Christianity is that one's desire must run toward a person, which is a profoundly human notion in and of itself. The alien thing about it comes when we realize that the person we're running after might look like us, walk like us, and talk like us, but He ain't from around these parts at all.

It is a telling thing, then, that there is a particular quote from Augustine that has haunted me since I first read it, that I return to year after year, sometimes for comfort, sometimes for the kick in the teeth. A quote that is at once devastating and profound, that reminds me it's possible to laugh, cry, dance, and sigh, and, if you're not careful, still miss the strong hand of love hidden just beyond the grey rain curtain of this world. A quote that never made much sense to me until I came to understand beauty as the thing that appeals to eros, the thing employed by the Holy Spirit to draw me, as Lewis would say, further up, and further in: “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new.”⁴
                                        

1 John Keats, Selected Poetry, ed. Elizabeth Cook (New York: Oxford, 1998), 178.

2 Anders Nygren, “The Heavenly Eros,” Agape and Eros (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 51.

3 C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Geneva: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1991), 93-94.

4 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford, 1991), 201.