I grew up in a Christian tradition that highly valued truth and goodness but in which beauty had no intentional place—and certainly not as an “ultimate value” worthy of pursuit for its own sake. We would hear about the beauty of holiness. And the beauty of nature was to be praised because it was God’s handiwork, but the accoutrements of man-made beauty were seen to easily distract the church from its God-given mission. The pursuit of beauty—as I learned in my childhood experience as well as in my historical research—was associated with refinement, excess, and wealth. Leaders like David Lipscomb (1831–1917) spoke sharply against beautiful and expensive church buildings—and the well-to-do members who built them. The church, he believed, was “the especial legacy of God to the poor of the earth”; the rich—the usual patrons of the arts—tended to be the “great corrupters” of the church.

We also tended to read the Bible with a kind of flat-footed literalness that focused on facts and commands. In one of the most common formulations in denominational heritage, the gospel was facts to be believed, commands to be obeyed, and promises to be enjoyed. In this way of reading, one must push past the “highly-colored imagery” in Scripture and retain only the “real facts and unadorned doctrine.” The “poetic element” must be “rendered simple.”

"Where the Beauty Came From," by C. Leonard Allen

In my essay last week for Humane Pursuits, I made the statement "beauty is an end in itself." This statement needs some clarification.

It's important to point out that we don't worship beauty. Beauty is certainly not an end in itself in that sense. Beauty is a signpost: It points us to the Maker of beauty--God Himself. When we see beauty, it is an echo of the glory of God, and beauty should lead us to praise Him.

 

When I say that beauty is an end in itself, I am saying that beauty has no utilitarian function. We don't paint landscapes, compose music, write poetry, or add architectural flourishes to buildings because of the utilitarian value involved. There is none! We do these things because beauty has intrinsic value. We love beautiful things because we simply delight in beauty.

 

And our delight in beauty reflects the image of God. God has created many aspects of this glorious world not to function efficiently but to simply be beautiful. I'm reminded of these words by Luci Shaw:

When the world was created, it might have seemed to be enough to have it work. To include beauty seems unnecessary for a mechanistic universe. We have been given a sense of the beautiful which can be regarded as gratuitous. Which it is--a gift of pure grace. And our own creation of beautiful things links us with our Creator. God was the first Quilter of prairies, the primal Painter (night skies, ferns, thunderheads, snow on cedars), the archetypal metal Sculptor (mountain ranges, icebergs), the Composer who heard the whales' strange, sonorous clickings and songs in his head long before there were whales to sound them, the Playwright who plotted the sweeping drama of Creation, Incarnation, Redemption, the Poet whose Word said it all.

In addition to creation, the Bible itself shows us that God values beauty. God could have given us a book-long list of rules and moral principles. But He didn't. Instead, God has given us poems, stories, letters, parables, epigrams, and even a love poem. The moral precepts are there, but the Bible is also full of creativity and imagination. As the Preacher says in Ecclesiastes, God has given us "words of delight." The delight is unnecessary, but it is there, and that fact is significant.

More from Luci Shaw:

Think, for a moment, on the priestly garments. In Exodus 28:40, "And for Aaron's sons you shall make coats and girdles and caps; you shall make them for glory and for beauty." In other words, glory to reflect Yahweh's splendor, and beauty, and adornment, because God delighted in it and wanted his people to enjoy it too. As Gene Edward Veith has said in The Gift of Art, "Beauty is an appropriate end in itself--the garments were to be made for beauty. The inventor of color, of form, of texture, the author of all natural beauties, values the aesthetic dimension for its own sake."

Rod Dreher on architecture's role in shaping our sense of beauty, community, connection with the past, and connection with the future:

"We have been trained to think that beauty is a luxury; consequently, most Americans now live in places that they find hard to love, and that make ordinary human community difficult. I'm thinking of a story my friend David, who lives in Washington, D.C., once told me about a conversation he overheard one day at work, between two older African-American women who were surprised to run into each other. The women had been neighbors in a supposedly run-down neighborhood in the District, one that had been marked in the 1960s for expensive 'urban renewal.' The government bought the residents out, bulldozed their houses, and built -- ta-daah!-- housing projects. You can imagine how well that turned out.

"David said that listening to those women talk about what they had known in their old neighborhood,  for all its faults, was to understand what spiritual violence had been done to those people in the name of progress. A complex web of human relations had been spun by generations of neighbors was brushed away by the benevolent hand of the state. Those folks who remained were warehoused in giant concrete boxes that they did not care for because, well, who in their right mind would care for something so dehumanizing? The community collapsed.

. . . 

"[Writer] James Howard Kunstler . . . contended that since about 1945, we've been building neighborhoods not to suit authentic needs for beauty and community, but to move product as cheaply and quickly as possible. For reasons of expedience and efficiency, Kunstler argued, Americans cut themselves off from architectural tradition. . . . We began to build houses and neighborhoods and cities that have no connection to the past or the future, and that ultimately are not worth caring about. Our built landscape, Kunstler has written, 'ends up diminishing us spiritually, impoverishing us socially, and degrading the aggregate set of cultural patterns that we call civilization.'"

. . . 

Dreher makes the same point about churches, and I think he is right. We can build church buildings that look like movie theaters, boxes, or gymnasiums, or we can build church structures that reflect, in some small way, the glory of God. Which of these buildings is more likely to shape feelings of reverent awe and wonder at the grandeur of God? "Your typical conservative will scoff at [such questions], but he can only dismiss these questions if he is determined to ignore human nature, and the way built environment both expresses humanity's deepest longings and aspirations, and the way it shapes them."

From Crunchy Cons

Makoto Fujimura's work is beautiful and profound.

"[The instructions God gave Solomon for the temple included] two freestanding columns [that] supported no architectural weight and had no utilitarian engineering significance. They were there only because God said they should be there as a thing of beauty. Upon the capitals of these columns were pomegranates fastened upon chains. Art work upon art work. If we understand what we are reading here, it simply takes our breath away. This is something overwhelmingly beautiful."

--Francis Schaeffer, Art and the Bible

"The temple was to be filled with art work. "And he [Solomon] garnished [covered] the house with precious stones for beauty" (2 Chron. 3:6). Notice this carefully: The temple was covered with precious stones for beauty. They had no utilitarian purpose. God simply wanted beauty in the temple. God is interested in beauty. ... There can be no question. Beauty has a place in the worship of God.

Young people often point out the ugliness of many evangelical church buildings. Unfortunately they are often right. Fixed down in our hearts is a failure to understand that beauty should be to the praise of God. But here in the temple which Solomon built under the leadership of God himself beauty was given an important place."

--Francis Schaeffer, Art and the Bible

"The arts and the sciences do have a place in the Christian life--they are not peripheral. For a Christian, redeemed by the work of Christ and living within the norms of Scripture and under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, the Lordship of Christ should include an interest in the arts. A Christian should use these arts to the glory of God, not just as tracts, mind you, but as things of beauty to the praise of God. An art work can be a doxology in itself."

--Francis Schaeffer, Art and the Bible

"Humans are useless." I agree.

Beauty is a more powerful persuader than data.

David Murray, "Truthful + Beautiful = Faithful"
http://headhearthand.org/blog/2012/09/10/truthful-beautiful-faithful/

Milton and Shakespeare don’t make concessions to our impoverished vocabularies. You may have to read them with a dictionary at first. And they don’t pause every twelve minutes for a word from their sponsors. They go their own way and we have to catch up. But it is worth it when we do. The very subjective pleasure, if you want to reduce everything to this, is so much greater and deeper and more intense with these writers than with the lesser entertainment we content ourselves with (for one thing because we don’t always want to involve ourselves so much or work so hard–which is fine sometimes, as long as we don’t reduce our aesthetic standards to our own lazy pleasures and exclude what is really objectively good).

Gene Veith, "Apprehending Beauty"
http://www.geneveith.com/2008/03/26/apprehending-beauty/

The Angles of Light: New and Selected Poems by Luci Shaw
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a collection of wonderful poetry by an outstanding Christian poet. Luci Shaw's poems in this volume are original and subtle, personal and profound, drawing on nature to show that for the Christian, the physical world is not neutral, but sacramental. Shaw reminds us that nature is a means for God to bless us and show us aspects of His glory and His grace. In particular, I love how Shaw uses light as a metaphor throughout the book to communicate the ideas of both enlightenment and beauty.

For me, these poems give a sense of wonder that the physical world can convey to us day by day if we will take the time to slow down and notice. In this way, even though Shaw's poetry is much more free in form, it reminds me of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Here's just a taste from one of my favorites in the book, "We know this to start with." This poem reminds us that we experience the wonder of this God-created, marvelous world through the five senses He gave us.

" . . . Somehow
without witchcraft or chicanery

we collect sounds and colors in a skyward
dish, like fruit in a bowl, and channel them
into verisimilitude--faces talking at us

from the tube's glass eye. Hallways of fog
enfold us in enigma. And then, the marvel of
window glass--how can anything be

hard enough to stop the hand and
hold its smudge while letting through this
soft light? The one wheat kernel that

breeds a thousand--a miracle of
loaves over and over again.
The stars, invisible in the blind day

revealed, thick as pollen, by the absence
of light."


View all my reviews

As Gene Edward Veith has said in The Gift of Art, "Beauty is an appropriate end in itself--the garments [for the tabernacle] were to be made for beauty. The inventor of color, of form, of texture, the author of all natural beauties, values the aesthetic dimension for its own sake. According to the clear statements of Scripture, art has its place in the will of God." . . .

The tragedy is that so many Christians, in their revulsion at the perverse aspects of such art, shun all art, even that which may spring from a God-honoring imagination. . . . The other "Christian" alternative is a conservatism that responds only to kitsch, a sentimental art of the Hallmark greeting card variety that cheapens true sentiment, turning it into sweetness and light or mere moralistic propaganda--no teeth, no guts, no muscle, no reality. No real Christianity, either, if we consider the Creator's work as our powerful, radical model.

Luci Shaw, "Beauty and the Creative Impulse"

Beauty matters. It is important to God. . . . Why else would he shape and color fish, birds, insects, rocks, plants, and people with such rich diversity? As my friend Elizabeth Rooney said, "Imagine making something as useful as a tree, as efficient at converting sunlight into food and fuel, as huge and tough as a white oak that can live 300 years, and then decorating it in spring with tiny pink leaves and pale green tassels of blossoms."

Luci Shaw, "Beauty and the Creative Impulse"

When the world was created, it might have seemed to be enough to have it work. To include beauty seems unnecessary for a mechanistic universe. We have been given a sense of the beautiful which can be regarded as gratuitous. Which it is--a gift of pure grace. And our own creation of beautiful things links us with our Creator. God was the first Quilter of prairies, the primal Painter (night skies, ferns, thunderheads, snow on cedars), the archetypal metal Sculptor (mountain ranges, icebergs), the Composer who heard the whales' strange, sonorous clickings and songs in his head long before there were whales to sound them, the Playwright who plotted the sweeping drama of Creation, Incarnation, Redemption, the Poet whose Word said it all.

Luci Shaw, "Beauty and the Creative Impulse"

The church has given considerable attention to Truth and Goodness, to theology and ethics. But too often beauty has escaped us, or we have tried to escape from it. This is partly because of its innovative, experimental aspect, its way of reaching for originality or a new way of expressing an old standard. In many Christian circles this is felt to be dangerous; the pursuit of beauty is seen merely as an option, and a seductive one at that, because beauty can neither be controlled nor programmed.

Luci Shaw, "Beauty and the Creative Impulse"

For as God is infinitely the greatest Being, so he is allowed to be infinitely the most beautiful and the most excellent: and all the beauty to be found throughout the whole universe is but the reflection of the diffused beams of that Being who hath an infinite fulness of brightness and glory; God . . . is the foundation and fountain of all being and beauty.

Jonathan Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue