Peter Paul Rubens, *Landscape in Flanders* (1577)

The subject for this post is beauty as a way of encountering the divine. Let’s not use the Latin phrase, via pulchritudinis - an ugly mouthful!

I say divine here rather than “God”. I don’t like those discussions of beauty and Christianity that go something like: ‘We can trace the beauty of all creation back to the Creator’s loving hand.’ ‘All beauty harkens back to its source - God, our Father, the Author of all beauty’. ‘We can see the fingerprints of God throughout creation, the brush-strokes of the Master Painter.’

They make me squirm. I actually feel a mild disgust. They make me stop looking at the beauty of the bright clouds, the dust motes tumbling in midday sun. They say, or imply, that beauty isn’t intrinsic.

The whistling bird,

the flaxen poplar,

a slice of bread,

Landscape in Flanders,

her gorgeous lips,

his gorgeous lips…

I have to leave these and trace them all back to a “Heavenly Father”? How convoluted, if not sacrilegious.

Rowan Williams writes:

…the artist as artist is not called on to love God or the world or humanity, but to love what he or she is doing. (1)

This is radical faith. To trust in what we are doing, being. What we love.

I haven’t read much theological aesthetics. It’s a bit like when I was young and didn’t know whether to pursue Geography to a higher level or not. In the end, I chose “not” because I didn’t want to analyze or dissect my lovely experience of clouds. I chose Art History instead, and, to my great surprise, won a university scholarship. I got my best marks in a subject I was least invested in (in terms of doing well and helping me build a ‘useful future’).

Samuel Palmer, *The Bright Cloud* (c.1833-4)

I remember the moment I made the decision to keep doing Art History at uni. I was on top of Richmond Hill, Sumner, with my friend, Richard. We’d just finished a round of (very amateur) golf. Back then, there was a most picturesque, if rather rugged, nine holes course on the hill-top Greenwood’s farm. Now the golf course is gone, the farm is gone. It’s expensive, millionaire housing.

On top of Richmond Hill, looking up the arching North Canterbury coast and out into Pegasus Bay, full of feeling as I contemplated the coast and my future…

If I could put that feeling into words now, it might go something like this: I don’t want to analyze this, I want to worship it! Or, as Robert Hass writes, recalling Moby Dick:

We asked the captain what course of action he proposed to take toward a beast so large, terrifying, and unpredictable. He hesitated to answer, and then said judiciously: “I think I shall praise it.” (2)

Photo above: Cloud above Richmond Hill (taken on a pre-digital camera when I was a teenager).

Does Christianity have a special relationship - or claim - to beauty? Of course, Jesus was alive to beauty:

Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. (Luke 12: 27-40).

But so were other great, non-Christian, religious figures:

No more words. In the name of this place we drink in with our breathing, stay quiet like a flower. (Rumi)

Off the top of my head, without recourse to theology articles or the internet, the best “Christian” connection to beauty I can think of is this:

When we contemplate beauty, we cultivate love.

Certainly, Christianity has no monopoly on love, either. I’m not saying that the beauty we love is necessarily equivalent to love as revealed by Christian wisdom, sacred scripture, and ethics. But it’s at the very least the beginning of a dialogue, and one that is perhaps more friendly to other human (religious and non-religious) experiences, too.

Andrea Mantegna, *Crucifixion, known as the Calvary* (1457-1459)

Marc Chagall, *White Crucifixion* (1938)

Some church traditions preserve the way of beauty more than others. One of the great attractions of Anglican Christianity, to me, is that it has been a great lover of beauty as long as the Caroline Divines started pushing back against the Puritans. Earlier than that, too:

As the presence of God is honoured in worship, so excellence – ‘beauty’ – becomes a dominant value. Partly because of the legacy of Cranmer and the Authorised Version, with their self-consciously exquisite English, as well as the flourishing tradition of choral music preserved by Elizabeth I, there is a long-standing ethos of aesthetic excellence in Anglican worship. (3)

My local Anglican church, St Mary’s, is undergoing a ‘reordering’ and ‘decluttering’ of its interior. At the end of the process, I hope the beauty that is already there will have more space to shine out:

I hope, too, that we will avoid the temptation to make this undertaking instrumental to other ends, such as “mission” or attracting more people to God.

References:

(1) Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity (2006): (I can’t find the page reference).

(2) I have always suspected this is a quote from Herman Melville, Moby Dick, though I can’t find any reference to it. So it might just be Robert Hass’s own homage, from Praise (1979), p.1.

(3) Alan Bartlett, A Passionate Balance: the Anglican Tradition (2007), p.174.

The Way of Beauty

Sadhu Sundar Singh