At a theology conference I attended last semester, one of the speakers exhorted us to ‘go find the beauty.’ To find beauty, it is important that we know where it may be found. Beauty is not far from any of us, for we are constituent parts of it as the creatures of God. We all know God as he communicates his goodness to us through the things that are made. God is a spirit; and so, for us to perceive goodness, it was necessary that it should become sensible and visible.
The existence of beauty as a real, external quality is sometimes questioned, as are the other parts of reality that we take for granted. However, this should not disconcert any Christian; to have observed beauty inherent in nature and the very experience of life provides a more than sufficient answer to cynicism. The end for which man was made, and for which all other creatures were made, was so that God would receive glory through our knowing him. That innate aesthetic sense that I suppose everyone has, or very many people have, is a sense for the goodness of God and is possessed for no other purpose than to know his goodness.
A corollary of this undeniable testimony of experience is the confirmation of our own existence. We are not deceived in our perception of beauty; nor can we be deceived from perceiving that we exist (see Augustine of Hippo, City of God XI.26). The perpetual evidence of beauty for reality itself has a powerful existential function. We exist and we know that we exist. Thus, reality possesses the attribute of certainty, and beauty is one of the means by which we reach the confirmation of existence. Our constant confrontation with beauty is the way by which God proves his own being. God provides the proof of his being to us through what is made—which includes us. We are both the receivers of God’s revelation and part of that revelation itself.
We are right to appreciate every earthly enjoyment as long as we acknowledge the direction in which it is pointing. We become hedonists and lose sight of the value of sense as soon as we think aesthetics are directed at ourselves. It befits Christians to try to understand and rightly interpret the beautiful words of natural revelation which are gone out through all the earth and to the end of the world. Nowhere is their voice unheard. As Augustine once remarked regarding his observation of creation in his Confessions, creatures reply with beauty when we observe them. The creation is not silent: its voice is beauty.
Beauty has no significance or meaning apart from God. Every attempt at assigning meaning to that aesthetic sense which we have apart from referring it to what the Creator would have us know about him is a mere subjective exercise, with ‘meaning’ going no farther than the individual. What is it that we perceive about beauty? Do we not glimpse a certain intentionality, both in our own fabric to receive the revelation and in the rays of revelation itself? Gregory of Nazianzen brilliantly illustrates the function of beauty as he uses an illustration from music. We do not doubt intentionality when we hear a song or see an instrument fashioned for the express purpose of being pleasing to the ear. As put by Nazianzen, “every one who sees a beautifully made lute, and considers the skill with which it has been fitted together and arranged, or who hears its melody, would think of none but the lutemaker, or the luteplayer, and would recur to him in mind, though he might not know him by sight. And thus to us also is manifested That which made and moves and preserves all created things, even though He be not comprehended by the mind” (“The Second Theological Oration”).
The ultimate revelation of God is himself in the incarnation. All that has been made was made by and for Christ, and he has the preeminence. As we contemplate every earthly glory, our thoughts should be directed heavenward to the King of Glory and our one desire should be to behold the beauty of the LORD (Psalm 27:4). The end of any creature is not found in itself, but in its Creator. Every earthly splendor serves only to stir in the heart of Christ’s Church her desire to see him in the eschaton, the consummation of every constituent of our creaturely existence. Then the saved shall walk in the light of the glory of God (Rev. 21:23-24) and God will communicate his goodness with them face to face.
