Newman34
Beauty and truth have been linked throughout the history of Western thought, never more succinctly than in the famous couplet from John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” But while Pontius Pilate is cited in Scripture as having asked “What is truth?” there is more agreement, both historically and today, about the difference between truth and falsehood than there is about the definition of beauty. Aesthetic theories beginning with the ancient Greeks and continuing through much of the twentieth century almost invariably linked beauty and art. Christian theologians describe God as the supreme locus of beauty, from whom all other definitions or examples derive their authority and meaning.
As the arts have become increasingly visible in the church in recent years, there has been an increased interest in discussions of both beauty and art. Justifications for using art in worship as well as other areas of church life are often couched in the language of beauty. However, once such lofty aspirations are brought down to questions of specific artworks, disagreements over matters of taste and quality begin to appear. As in the secular world, what one person sees as the epitome of beauty, another sees as sentimental, outrageous, or hopelessly misguided. Arguments rage over whether this or that artwork is objectively beautiful, or if beauty is merely in the eye of the beholder.
Sometimes, the concept of beauty is enlisted to encompass artworks that repulse either through their subject matter, the handling of materials, or some other factor, and yet are recognized as genuine contributions to human understanding. In such cases, the very definition of beauty is stretched so far beyond its useful limits that it would be better to use some other measures by which to define quality in the arts. In this chapter, we will look at some of the ways that both beauty and art have been seen by philosophers, theologians, and ordinary Christians; suggest a way to talk about quality in art without resorting to notions of beauty; and consider a new way of talking about beauty that steers a careful path between the dangerous rocks of universalizing absolutes and the chaotic whirlpool of unrestrained relativism.
Defining Beauty
The earliest known definition of artistic beauty is the Canon, or Rule, of Polykleitos, known today only through the report of other ancient writers. This Rule does not concern beauty in a general sense, or even in art broadly defined, but rather specifically addresses beauty as perceived in the proportions of the human figure in sculpture. The second-century-BCE physician, Galen, reports that, according to Polykleitos, beauty in this area was not found in strict symmetry, but rather in the correct, proportional relationships among the various parts of the body.35 Other ancient writers expanded on this definition, including not only symmetry and proportion, but various combinations of balance, harmony, unity, radiance, and similar qualities.
Today, when people try to define beauty, they often refer to these ideas, along with words like elegance, refinement, or clarity. Beauty is often described as that which gives a deep pleasure or satisfaction, or has a certain rightness, or perfection. For many, beauty is profoundly spiritual, linked to experiences of transcendence or the divine. In classical philosophy, beauty was one of the three transcendental virtues, equal in importance to truth and goodness. In theology, these three find their ultimate source, measure, and value in God.
Aesthetics, Art Theory, and History
Dictionaries typically define the word aesthetics with respect to the nature or appreciation of beauty. A look at the Greek root will reveal a meaning that is less about beauty than about sensory awareness or sensation. The opposite of aesthetic, after all, is anesthetic: something that puts the senses to sleep. Nevertheless, when philosophers and theologians consider aesthetics, they are almost always talking about beauty.
Alexander Gottleib Baumgarten (1714–1762) is often credited with coining the term in 1735, as the name of a field of study within the more general discipline of philosophy. However, for centuries before that, philosophers and theologians had much to say about beauty, art, the world of the senses, and the relationships among them. Indeed, so many authors have traced the history of philosophical aesthetics from Plato and the ancient Greeks to the modern era that it seems superfluous, as well as presumptuous, for me to cover such well-trodden territory. As I am neither an historian nor a philosopher, any summary that I might make would be certain to be incomplete. More to the point, such a digression would be much too long and distract from the central themes of this volume.
However, it is not possible to write about either art or beauty without any reference to the historical background that informs the current state of the discussion. Perhaps the most important thing to note is that up until relatively recently philosophers and theologians have generally assumed that art and beauty were inextricably bound up in one another. As philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto puts it in his influential work, The Abuse of Beauty,
The philosophical conception of aesthetics is almost entirely dominated by the idea of beauty, and this was particularly the case in the eighteenth century—the great age of aesthetics—when apart from the sublime, the beautiful was the only aesthetic quality actively considered by artists and thinkers.36
In these discussions, it has often been assumed that beauty (or the lack thereof) was a property of an object, something that anyone with the proper perceptual equipment could recognize as easily as they could its shape or size or acoustical properties. For centuries, philosophical theories about art tended to rest on the twin notions that the purpose of art was to be beautiful, and that the merit of any artwork, as measured by its beauty, would universally be recognized and acknowledged. By the eighteenth century, however, this presumed universality was in endangered by a move towards subjective relativism in which beauty existed only in the eye of the beholder.
In Voicing Creation’s Praise, theologian Jeremy Begbie surveys philosophical notions about art and aesthetics in the early modern period. Placing Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) at the apex of the Enlightenment, he points out that in Kant’s writings the universality of beauty is one of its hallmarks. For Kant, although the experience of beauty was subjective, it was not idiosyncratic. Everyone, he asserted, should agree that this or that thing was objectively beautiful. Begbie notes that Kant, as well as other philosophers, realizes that beauty is not something that can be known intellectually or objectively, but must be sensed subjectively. He writes,
. . . it is clearly hard for Kant to provide a convincing account of the universal validity of aesthetic judgements [sic], despite his intention to avoid relativism. The universality of judgements of taste is grounded only in the universality of the subjective conditions for judging objects, and it is not evident that we can ever ascertain whether the subjective conditions necessary for an authentic experience of beauty are actually operative. Not surprisingly, Kant says little about aesthetic disputes and how they might be resolved.37
Theological aesthetic theories tend to follow Kant, and like him, give little help towards resolving aesthetic disputes. It is this difficulty that opens the way toward relativism. For David Hume (1711–1776), the nature of aesthetic judgment is entirely subjective, arising from our sense experiences, memories, imagination, and dreams. Begbie asserts that for Hume, beauty is not an a priori concept, but an idea arising from a series of impressions, a matter of pleasure and satisfaction rather than some kind of absolute, external reality. For Hume, it is not only beauty, but also “tastes and colours, and all other sensible qualities” which exist not in the object, but merely in the senses.38
In these philosophical discussions about beauty, little effort was made to distinguish between theories relating to the beauty of the natural world and those relating to art. Both philosophers and artists seemed to simply assume that beauty was an integral property of art, and that the beauty found in art was no different than the beauty found in the natural world. This began to change with the Aesthetics of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), a work based on his lectures throughout the 1820s and published in 1830. Danto notes his own excitement on reading Hegel:
There were two thoughts on the very
