Happy Thursday, TBB passengers!
Here it is, as promised: a post not originally written as an undergraduate at Christendom College (mainly because I’ve exhausted all TBB-worthy content from that time period). I won’t waste your time with a long intro today, except to recommend a good movie for lent. The movie is called Calvary—it’s nitty, it’s gritty, it’s beautiful, it’s great. It’s directed by John Michael McDonagh, and it stars Brendan Gleeson. Please watch!
As for this following post, I hope you enjoy it.
In mysterio Verbi,
James
Beauty Saves & Beauty Kills
We speak of sin taking on a sweet, seductive character. We speak of the devil as a gentleman. Sin and evil hardly ever appear as sin and evil before and during the time we choose them; realizing our personal sin is usually a matter of retrospection, whether proximate or remote to the time it was committed. We become blinded by our misconstrued passions, by our clouded intellects, and by our tainted wills, and evil (i.e., the lack of the good, according to the Augustinian principle) usually takes on an attractive luster. To quote Harry Styles, sin “tastes like strawberries on a summer evenin'.” Evil, sin, lies, lust, vanity, vice, prejudice, pride, the bachelorette—whatever it may be—the reality is that the devil is a makeup artist. He is a con artist, a fraud, and a propagator of lies, and he does his job very well. In fact, he’s the best in the business. Dungeons he dresses in décor delightful, sickness of soul he appears to make sweet, but pick the plump fruit to consume and devour, and into the mire we fall in defeat.
I bring this all up to illustrate a point, which is that the evil we choose doesn’t make itself apparent. Like false prophets, evil comes to you “in sheep’s clothing,” that is, the appearance of beauty, but underneath there are “ravenous wolves” (Mt 7:15). The good life, a virtuous life, would be much easier for all of us to live if evil was always apparent. Evil hides and disguises itself very closely behind “the good” in many enticing ways (it hides in the peripheries of the good, you could say). The obvious and apparent evils, too, many a time are goods disguised, yet the devil has done his work to deflect our understanding of them. He’s a master of red herrings when it comes to grey moral areas or moments of temptation.
As I would like to emphasize today, however, evil plays this hiding game incredibly well in one particular facet of life: beauty.
In a recent conversation with my parents (with whom I rarely converse without benefitting from their wisdom somehow), they brought up a striking and sobering quote by Leo Tolstoy, who once said, "It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness." If true, and I believe that it is, then it’s a rather scary thing to consider. In my experience as a liberal arts undergrad at Christendom, there was continuous talk about “the true, the good, and the beautiful,” and the analogous similarities that these three transcendentals share (ultimately unified by God himself). As a sophomore in Mrs. Hickson’s literature class, I vividly remember reading and being inspired (the type of inspiration that sends chills down your spine) by excerpts of Solzhenitsyn’s 1970 Nobel Lecture, in which he opens by quoting Fyodor Dostoevsky, who, in turn, “once enigmatically let drop the phrase: ‘beauty will save the world.’” As both a junior and a senior, I embarked on an intellectual journey with Dr. McInerny, via his electives on art and beauty, to discover the power of beauty in art, film, craft, culture, literature, and life. In summary: the beautiful was always true and always good.
Tolstoy’s words, therefore, seemed to strike at the heart of a narrative that I had developed during my time as a liberal arts student, and is one that many of my fellow Christendom alumni and I hold. As Sheldon Vanauken states in his faith autobiography A Severe Mercy, “There may be a danger in the love of beauty, though it seems treason to say it.” Tolstoy’s words, too, seem a treason of sorts. If the true, the good, and the beautiful were analogous in some ultimate sense, then it seemed that something beautiful necessarily entailed the equivalent “amount” of truth, and of goodness. The more beautiful, the better, right?
But, then again, there is something else that I take from my undergraduate years at Christendom that I think can help to discern something out of this seeming contradiction (i.e., that beauty is goodness, and that beauty is delusion). This second takeaway is one of the anchor points, or, more precisely, it is the anchor, not only of my last post, but also of my own philosophy of life. This premise is one of the most foundational points in the Thomistic-Aristotelian tradition, I believe, and it is—emphatically—the notion that appetite affects vision.
As such, there is that which is beautiful and there is that which appears to be beautiful. There is also that which is between these two poles, and I think that this is where many of us find ourselves: living in a complex, nuanced world of true beauty and apparent beauty. Many things that appear to be beautiful are, in fact, beautiful to a certain degree or another, but the degree of their beauty is slightly twisted, or misconstrued; we tend to give undue legitimacy to such instances of beauty. As already emphasized, the evil hides in the peripheries, the margins, and the silhouette of the good, so it does usually have some sort of attachment to the good, some rationalizable merit, but it’s ever so slightly off the mark, and this is what makes evil the most dangerous. No matter how beautiful something may seem, there is never justification for disregarding or marginalizing the truth or goodness of the matter at hand. Something may appear to be beautiful, but is it also true and good?
I say this all not to raise a sort of beauty paranoia (I, myself, am a constant victim of beauty’s game), but I say it because I believe that beauty is a mysterious force within nature that needs to be reckoned with. It is a force, a reality, that is not impregnable to the devil’s usage. There’s a balance that needs to be found which allows for our minds, hearts, and souls to be inspired by the beautiful, but also not to be blinded by the twisted use of beautiful, dazzling things. There are not few instances of men in history who were blinded by the ways of beautiful women (to be clear, the men are not innocent “victims” of these cases); there are not few instances of women and men who are blinded by vain pageantry or spoiled splendor. In a sense, we are not victims of beauty, but beauty is a victim of our broken appetites.
Now, you might not have beauty paranoia, but all this talk of subverted beauty is surely somewhat depressing and negative. So, I want to switch tracks. Let’s explore a more positive facet of this predicament.
A stunning sunset wanes and the singing, summer sun completes its slow dive into the dark waters of the horizon, and you’re left in the wake of wonder, the slipstream of serendipity. Despite the incredible beauty of the moment that you’ve just experienced, deep inside of you there’s an ache, a pain, and an unsatisfied sense of fulfillment. Despite the positive power of the beautiful moment, it unfolds a feeling of negation within you, that is, a lack of something still desired and yet to be truly sated. You become aware of a sort of death, a death of your ignorance, and death, perhaps, to the belief that you are something that you are not. Your ignorance is the victim and beauty is the killer; she subtly murders the lies within you that you used as your crutches, and you’re left standing on your own, crippled (now you’re thinking, “James, how the heck is this positive??). But this feeling isn’t just negative, as the philosopher and theologian Etienne Gilson proposes, but instead should awaken us to an ultimately positive reality.
"We must understand in the first place that the very insatiability of human desire has a positive significance; it means this: that we are attracted by an infinite good. Disgust with each particular good is but the reverse side of our thirst for the total good; weirdness is but a presentiment of the infinite gulf that lies between the thing loved and the thing within love's capacity. In this sense the problem of love, as it arises in Christian philosophy, is a precise parallel to the problem of knowledge. By intelligence the soul is capable of truth; by love it is capable of the Good; its torment arises from the fact that it seeks it without knowing what it seeks and, consequently, without knowing where to look for it. (Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, p. 272-3)
“Disgust” with “particular goods” doesn’t necessarily mean, of course, that we are disgusted with these goods, but it seems more to the point that we are disgusted by the fact that they do not ultimately make us happy. These goods inevitably leave us hungry again, and when we do have the chance to indulge in them again, indulge in them we usually do, to a fault. The point is, whether we lose or abuse the good, we are left unsatisfied in the end. Beauty, in truth, has this character too. So, whether we are led astray by the “beautiful” or whether we are truly inspired by the beautiful, we are left aware of our incomplete, human state. Beauty, for evil or for good, is a sort of double edge sword that cuts our souls both ways: the cut of evil dismembers and disjoins our soul; the cut of good cuts more in a way that is like the blade of the surgeon to remove the chronic cancer from our soul.
Beauty saves and beauty kills; it damns, and it redeems.
There it is, then, the predicament of man, especially the modern man, in one critical aspect of his life. The man of today’s culture is lost in the mired and messy ruins of the Enlightenment, and he roams the streets of the modern metropolis and academia where the postmodern wolves prowl and prey upon his hopes, his desires, and his anguishing soul. The issue is not that the beautiful is gone. The issue is that the beautiful is twisted, subverted, and misused. More and more, the culture of today offers us, unknowingly, the beauty of evil, justifying its goodness by the mere fact that it is “beautiful.” (The modern, radical notion of “art for art’s sake” is a variant of this predicament, I believe, but that’s a topic for another time.) Beauty can indeed save the world, as Dostoevsky states, but “beauty” could also kill it.
However, regardless of the predicament of the modern man and the postmodern wolves, let’s not forget the log in our own eyes (Mt 7:5). As the comedian Jim Gaffigan points out, we might not eat at McDonalds, but, in a sense, we all have our “own McDonalds” (see 5:48 of clip for exact quotation). Not that some McDonalds aren’t better or worse than others, but we all tend to be blind to our own false prophets, i.e., false sentiments of beauty. And this is what I’d like to leave you with today:
Where in your own life do you think the beautiful is given undue priority or justification?
It doesn’t just have to physical things. Indeed, this is a danger that is much more dangerous in the spiritual realm than it is in the material realm, for much of the issue finds its source in the former.
“For all men who were ignorant of God were foolish by nature;
and they were unable from the good things that are seen to know him who exists,
nor did they recognize the craftsman while paying heed to his works;
but they supposed that either fire or wind or swift air,
or the circle of the stars, or turbulent water,
or the luminaries of heaven were the gods that rule the world.
If through delight in the beauty of these things men assumed them to be gods,
let them know how much better than these is their Lord,
for the author of beauty created them.
And if men were amazed at their power and working,
let them perceive from them
how much more powerful is he who formed them.
For from the greatness and beauty of created things
comes a corresponding perception of their Creator.
Yet these men are little to be blamed,
for perhaps they go astray
while seeking God and desiring to find him.
For as they live among his works they keep searching,
and they trust in what they see, because the things that are seen are beautiful.
Yet again, not even they are to be excused;
for if they had the power to know so much
that they could investigate the world,
how did they fail to find sooner the Lord of these things?”
~ Wisdom 13:1-9 ~