Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, Part 3

Bulletin Roundtable

Bulletin Roundtable

In this multipart Roundtable, our three regular contributors are exploring the transcendentals—fundamental attributes of being that in much Christian thinking consist of truth, goodness, and beauty. In previous weeks, Dr. Paul Copan surveyed the transcendental of truth, and Dr. David Baggett explored the transcendental of goodness. Today, Dr. Paul Gould concludes the series by examining the transcendental of beauty.

Paul M. Gould

Beauty

In this month’s Roundtable discussion, we’re exploring the so-called transcendentals: goodness, truth, and beauty. Goodness, truth, and beauty, along with unity, are called the “transcendentals” because they are thought to be attributes or characteristics of every existing thing. This seems right to me. Moreover, I believe that we’ve been created by God to be nourished on the good, the true, and the beautiful. So, this is an important topic. I’ll explore what I think has been the relatively neglected transcendental of beauty. We’ll explore briefly four questions: What is the nature of beauty? What is the source of beauty? What is the role of beauty? Can we live without beauty?

First, what is the nature of beauty? To gain clarity, let’s begin with a distinction, noted long ago by Plato, between beautiful things and Beauty itself. In the Republic, Socrates is asked: “What about someone who believes in beautiful things, but doesn’t believe in the beautiful itself and isn’t able to follow anyone who could lead him to the knowledge of it? Don’t you think he is living in a dream rather than a wakened state? . . . [Socrates:] I certainly think that someone who does that is dreaming” (Plato, Republic, 476c). So, we have beautiful things—Texas sunsets, Florida beaches, the law of gravity, the Mona Lisa, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, the urban beauty of a well-planned park, the sacred beauty of a cathedral, human beauty, and more. Beauty manifests itself in the particular, in things (including abstract things like laws of logic, nature, and arithmetic). But there is something all beautiful things have in common, as Plato would put it, Beauty itself! This leads to an important discovery: beauty is an objective feature of the world! Beauty is not merely “in the eye of the beholder,” rather it is something we can behold with the eye (or ear, or nose, or more generally, the mind). So, beauty exists independent of minds. But there is a subjective component to beauty too: it is apprehended by minds. Aquinas, in my opinion, said it best. Regarding the subjective component to Beauty, Aquinas writes that “[T]he ‘beautiful’ is something pleasant to apprehend” (ST I-II, 27.1).[1] Regarding the objective side of beauty, Aquinas provides criteria for identifying beautiful things: “For beauty includes three conditions, ‘integrity’ or ‘perfection,’ since those things which are impaired are by the very fact ugly; due ‘proportion’ or ‘harmony’; and lastly, ‘brightness’ or ‘clarity,’ whence things are called beautiful which have a bright color” (ST 1.39.8).[2]

Second, what is the source of beauty? The Christian tradition took the Platonic insight, along with the distinction between beautiful things and Beauty itself, and located Beauty in or with the divine. As Augustine describes in one of my favorite passages from the Confessions, “ . . . My supremely good Father, beauty, beauty of all things beautiful” (Confessions, III.10). God is Beauty itself and beautiful things are beautiful because they participate in God. Aquinas describes the participatory nature of beauty in his commentary on the Divine Names of Dionysius as follows: “The beauty of the creature is nothing else than the likeness of the divine beauty participated in things.”[3] God is the source of Beauty. God is beautiful or Beauty itself and creatures are beautiful because they participate in the divine.

Third, what is the role of beauty? In my book Cultural Apologetics I discuss the role of beauty in terms of three functions: beauty awakens, consoles, and transports. Beauty evokes desire. It awakens our heart and greets us as a kind and gentle friend, inviting us to embark on a journey to a home we’ve never been to but always longed for. Beauty consoles us too. It makes us whole, it produces rest as we experience, in beautiful things, the fittingness or harmony or match of some slice of reality with the divine. We catch a glimpse, through an image, a song, a sonnet of our place in the divine drama. It transports us also: out of the mundane, the ugly, the painful. We are given a moment of respite and rest.

Finally, is there a connection between beauty and human flourishing? Yes. One of my favorite stories is about the Landfill Harmonic Orchestra. It demonstrates the human propensity to seek and make beauty. There is a small village of 2,500 families built around a landfill just outside Paraguay’s capital city of Asuncion. A few years ago, guided by the conviction that music—and beauty—are not luxuries of the privileged and rich, but a basic necessity for all, former environmental technician Favio Chavez came up with an idea. In order to keep kids from playing in the landfill, he would instead teach them to play music. Building instruments out of recycled trash, Chavez began to teach the kids how to play music. At first, people mocked the effort, but then as beauty rose from the trash heap, the world took notice. And lives were changed—children were given the gift of hope, beauty, and purpose, eventually traveling the world to play their recycled forks and plastic cans turned violins and Cellos in front of audiences worldwide. I was struck, watching the documentary Landfill Harmonic, with the power of beauty to transform lives and give people hope for a better world. We are naturally drawn to beauty; we seek meaning and purpose in life, and often, this involves incorporating beauty into the world around us, a world that sometimes is full of trash, wickedness, and pain. In fact, I love how Favio Chavez describes their experience: “The World sends us garbage . . . we send back music.” I think this is a beautiful statement and probably more profound than Chavez realizes, because all of us experience trials, pain, ugliness, and temptation, and we are called to turn it into something beautiful as we look to Christ as our greatest need and highest good.

The evidence from social science confirms the link between beauty and happiness. In an article written for the Atlantic, Cody C. Delistraty summarizes the results of a study on happiness and beauty in an urban setting as follows:

The usual markers of happiness are colloquially known as the “Big Seven”: wealth (especially compared to those around you), family relationships, career, friends, health, freedom, and personal values . . . . According to the Goldberg study, however, what makes people happiest isn’t even in the Big Seven. Instead, happiness is most easily attained by living in an aesthetically beautiful city. The things people were constantly surrounded by—lovely architecture, history, green spaces, cobblestone streets—had the greatest effect on their happiness. The cumulative positive effects of daily beauty worked subtly but strongly.[4]

We might ask then, what is it about beauty that connects it to happiness? One provocative answer has to do with hope—the virtue of the pilgrim on the way to God:

“Beauty manifests a hope that life would be better if the object of beauty were part of it,” writes Princeton philosopher Alexander Nehemas in Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art.[5]

So, beauty awakens within us a longing for home—for God—for a world made right, and this longing propels us forward and sustains us on the journey to the source of beauty, God himself.

I tried to capture some of these thoughts, in a beautiful way, in this video.  In addition, Courtney McLean and I explore in season three of The Eudo Podcast the connections between beauty, art, and apologetics.  Check these resources out, pass them along, and let us know what you think! Even more, bring beauty back into your life—in the things you make and the things you find to nourish your soul.

Notes

[1] Accessed at: <https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2027.htm#article1>.  

[2] Accessed at: < https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1039.htm#article8>.  

[3] Aquinas, in Divinis Nominibus, c.4. lect. 5, n337, quoted in Jonathan King, The Beauty of the Lord (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018), 34.

[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/08/the-beautyhappiness-connection/375678/, quoted in Galli, Beautiful Orthodoxy, 54.    

[5] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/08/the-beautyhappiness-connection/375678/.  

— Paul M. Gould is an Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Director of the M.A. Philosophy of Religion program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. He is the author or editor of ten scholarly and popular-level books including Cultural Apologetics, Philosophy: A Christian Introduction and The Story of the Cosmos. He has been a visiting scholar at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School’s Henry Center, working on the intersection of science and faith, and is the founder and president of the Two Tasks Institute. You can find out more about Dr. Gould and his work at www.paul-gould.com and https://www.twotasksinstitute.org. He is married to Ethel and has four children.

Image by James Wheeler from Pixabay

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Recommended Resource

One of the defining characteristics of Christian theism is its understanding of the nature and attributes of God. As one studies the doctrine of God, a number of questions naturally arise: Does God change? Does God have emotions? Does everything occur as God wills? Is God entirely good and loving? How can God be one God and three persons?

Skeptics frequently charge that one or more of God’s attributes is incoherent, or that they contradict one another. Believers often wonder what it means, for example, that God is unchanging or all-loving, and how they should understand God in light of these qualities.

Given the importance of these questions for the Christian worldview, we highly recommend John C. Peckham’s recent book on this topic, Divine Attributes: Knowing the Covenantal God of Scripture. Drawing on Scripture, theology, and philosophy, Peckham explains each attribute in detail, engages with the most important scholarship related to it, and shows how each can be understood in a theologically faithful and philosophically robust manner.

See our recent excerpt from the book titled The God of the Philosophers?

“This volume on the divine attributes and ‘covenantal theism’ is a superb work of theology. It is thorough, nuanced, and balanced. As in his other works, Peckham is both winsome and bold: he winsomely engages important age-old and more recent theological conversations and controversies, and he boldly challenges certain theological positions while confidently articulating and defending the considerable merits of covenantal theism.”

— Paul Copan, Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics, Palm Beach Atlantic University; author of Loving Wisdom: A Guide to Philosophy and Christian Faith

“Divine Attributes will be a game changer for debates about the nature of God. Strict classical theists and open theists must deal with the powerful biblical case that Peckham presents. If you are looking for a theology text that is faithful to the biblical witness and sensitive to the philosophical challenges that arise from thinking about the nature of God, then Divine Attributes is the book for you.”

— R. T. Mullins, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies

Find Divine Attributes: Knowing the Covenantal God of Scripture at Baker, Amazon, and other major booksellers.

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(*The views expressed in the articles and media linked to do not necessarily represent the views of the editors of The Worldview Bulletin.)

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