Beauty and the Eye of the Beholder

By Donald T. Williams

The question was raised on a C. S. Lewis listserv I belong to, “What is beauty?”  One answer, from Lewis scholar Jim Prothero, was that beauty is “holiness made visible.”  Another correspondent questioned the adequacy of that formula. A Prostitute may be beautiful but is hardly holy, she noted; Jesus’ mangled body on the cross was holy, but hardly beautiful. 

How do we sort through all this complexity?  It would be impossible to attempt an answer in a short essay that anyone would be willing to plough through.  But I will attempt to steer my way between the Scylla of adequacy and the Charybdis of silence by offering a few random thoughts, as inadequate (this I know) as they are tantalizing (this I hope).

We had better start with some definitions.  Beauty, along with Truth and Goodness, are known as “the transcendental values” because they are self-justifying. That is, they are so basic that it is hard to see how they can be justified in terms of any other value lying behind them.  All other values are valuable in so far as they exemplify or participate in one of the transcendentals. This proposition seems self-evident when you think about it, but it raises the questions of how the transcendentals relate to each other and whether they might have a source that would explain their inescapably transcendent status.

I suggest that there is one answer that does justice to both questions. Only one source could lie behind the transcendentals, and that source would have to be Transcendence itself. Therefore, Truth is the reflection of God’s mind, Goodness of His character, and Beauty of His glory, as they are found in the world He has made.  Thus I try to summarize the matter in my longish scholarly essay on the topic.[1] 

That gives us a place to start, but questions remain. Because the world is cursed and our minds fallen, we rarely encounter the transcendentals in their purity here below, nor can they be sequestered from our suffering.  This complicates the way we have to relate to them.  We can therefore be mistaken about all three transcendentals.  But it hardly follows from this either that they are not real or that we are utterly incapable of recognizing them truly.  For Christ, their ultimate Source, has entered the world redemptively and consequently even suffering and sorrow have been taken up into them. In the case of Beauty (to get back to our original question), our minds can be fooled by surface prettiness.  To explain all this more fully, I will need a sonnet.

LIFE
“Life is pain, princess. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.”
–Westley the Farm Boy

It’s not so much a matter of amounts.
When it comes to suffering, all men have their share.
They weep in taking their first breath of air
And rattle when their last one they renounce.
Between them, troubles wait their turn to pounce.
Adrift in apathy driven to despair,
Insistently continuing to care?
It’s what they let it do to them that counts.

Without deep hurt, true Beauty can’t be born.
Those who deny this truth have been abused
By surface prettiness the eye can see.
The real thing’s founded in the way we mourn:
In sorrow felt and bitterness refused,
In pain transmuted into poetry.[2] 

How does this all work out in terms of our original question? Even the surface prettiness partakes of some faint hint of the real thing, however twisted.  For, as Augustine teaches us, Evil is always a parasite on the Good.  But true Beauty in its deepest form must be consistent with Truth and Goodness.  The surface prettiness of the Prostitute is thus a perversion of Beauty, related to it by the real presence of good form and proportion, but not partaking of its fullness.  And the surface ugliness of the Crucifixion hides the beauty of God’s holiness from those who do not penetrate deeper to see the meaning of His love.  Instead of that, they can see only “cosmic child abuse.”  Thus they miss the Beauty of Christ’s sacrifice precisely by missing also its Goodness and its Truth.

Prothero wants us to pursue “something higher and more beautiful than beauty, which, like joy, is not an end (a frequent mistake made in our culture) but a sign of higher things.”  Yes; I see what he means.  I think I agree, though I would not say it quite like that.  I would put it this way:  We only see Beauty in a partial and distorted way unless we see it as related to Truth and Goodness and see their unity as abiding in God.  The Prostitute’s beauty is not unreal, but it is partial and therefore distorted—physical only.  Because Beauty in its fullness is related to Truth and Goodness, it cannot be seen with the eye alone, but only with the mind—and only fully by a mind renewed and enlightened by grace.  The Prostitute still has the part that the eye can see—but only that.  And the mind enlightened by grace can see the deeper Beauty in something like the Crucifixion where the eye’s part is missing.

So Prothero’s formula, “Beauty is visible Holiness,” is I think true in an ultimate sense, but it is not a truth that we can hope to see on first inspection, and never when the inspection is made by the eye alone.  I don’t ever expect to see Mother Teresa’s face gracing the cover of Cosmo; but I’ll bet she was very beautiful to the poor of Calcutta, and I’ll bet they saw that beauty even in the specific features of her face: the compassion in her eyes, the love in her smile. 

Inadequate?  Surely.  Tantalizing?  We shall see.  You can always still read that longish scholarly discussion.[3]

Notes

[1] Donald T. Williams, “A Tryst with the Transcendentals: C. S. Lewis on Goodness, Truth, and Beauty,” published as a series of chapters in Reflections from Plato’s Cave: Essays in Evangelical Philosophy (Lynchburg: Lantern Hollow Press, 2012): 81-139.

[2] Donald T. Williams, Stars Through the Clouds: The Collected Poetry of Donald T. Williams, 2^nd ed. (Lynchburg: Lantern Hollow Press, 2019): 400.

[3] In Reflections from Plato’s Cave, op. cit.

— Donald T. Williams, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Toccoa Falls College.  A border dweller, he stays permanently camped out on the borders between serious scholarship and pastoral ministry, theology and literature, Narnia and Middle-earth.  He is the author of fourteen books, most recently Answers from Aslan: The Enduring Apologetics of C. S. Lewis (Tampa: DeWard, 2023).

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