Beauty: What is the meaning of beauty?
(Aesthetics & Art)
“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” –Genesis 1:31
I. Discussion Questions
a. Thinking through the course of a normal day, where do you find beauty in life?
b. How do you think your day would be different without beauty?
c. Based on your encounters with beauty, how would you define it? What is it? How does it
work? Why is it important?
II. What is the most fundamental issue with the topic of Beauty?
a. Is Beauty objective or subjective?
i. Examples of each?
ii. My examples: Obj, Stonehenge or Rocky Mountains; Sub, what’s your favorite
movie?
iii. My rationale: Objective value and Subjectively satisfying are two different things
without needing a distinction to be made between them.
1. What happens if beauty is purely subjective?
a. How do we know what is beautiful if beauty is different for
everyone? Calls forth the need for a universal concept of beauty.
2. What happens if beauty is purely objective?
a. It’s substantial, but very rigid. No real, personal experience is
necessary. It’s beauty-as-information...The Louvre would have one
piece of art in it, or the same piece of art throughout it.
b. Two quotes to illustrate the need for both sides:
“St. Thomas, in his brilliant manner, concluded that nature lies between two intellects: God’s creating mind and our
discovering what he has conceived and made. This is why everything in the universe is unfathomable, why the
various scientific disciplines never come to understand anything completely. New discoveries raise new questions,
all the way from tiny atoms to the still tinier superstrings, from the huge supernovas to the vastly more enormous 50
billion galaxies. The same is true in physics, biochemistry, and microbiology–indeed, everything that I have read
about in the visible universe: we grasp nothing in its entirety. And as we have noted in an earlier chapter, the cosmos
is saturated in mathematics–and math can be done only by an intellect. All of this is so because everything arises
from the inexhaustible fecundity [i.e. “producing an abundance of new growth”] of the divine mind. Things are
intelligible, they make sense because there is someone to make them make sense. Otherwise everything would be
pure chaos. Yes, Aquinas had it right: nature lies between the divine mind, which creates, and our human minds,
which discover.
A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.”1
“Most people dare not make strong affirmations about the ultimate nature of the world’s essence or about the
ultimate justice of human actions. But all those who have been once affected inwardly by the worldly beauty of either
nature, or of a person’s life, or of art, will surely not insist that they have no genuine idea of what beauty is. The
beautiful brings forth with it a self-evidence that en-lightens without mediation.”2
c. What do these two quotes signify about the importance of beauty?
i. Beauty is the logical ends of discovery.
1. “Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for
the spiritual, for the ideal: that longing which draws people to art. Modern art has
taken a wrong turn in abandoning the search for the meaning of existence in order
to affirm the value of the individual for its own sake.”3
1
Thomas Dubay, The Evidential Power of Beauty, 320
2
Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, I:37
3
Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 38
2. When you get more serious about life, what you desire to engage with
changes, as well.
a. Perfect example is Lord of the Rings. As a child, I see war movies; as a
man, I see the struggle between good and evil, personal ethics about
right and wrong, and a story of friendship.
b. Tree of Life….
3. If Beauty is the ends of discovery, then what we may conclude is that a true
encounter with Beauty is impossible without asking big questions first
(Life’s Universal Questions, for example).
a. This is why we say good movies are “boring.” They’re not boring,
rather we are. Could say the same about books...
ii. Beauty draws out delight and pleasure in a way that aligns with reality.
1. Read: Book of Delights, 7. Praying Mantis
2. Beauty is the only means by which Truth might be revealed AND accepted.
a. Mini thesis: Beauty is a legitimate form of knowledge.
b. Interconnection of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness...cannot have one
without the other two in some form.
c. Which of the three transcendentals do you think people might be
more responsive to? Quotes below to illustrate...
3. “beauty is the only stuff in which Truth can be clothed.”4
4. “The criterion of truth (of both divine and total human truth, as well as of
supernatural and natural truth) is beauty.”5
II. Dietrich Von Hildebrand; Liturgy and Personality
a. “It is above all a sign of deficiency in depth and breadth when a man thinks more of
goods which merely procure pleasure…than of goods providing spiritual happiness.”
b. Most important point that you will hear today: there are two aspects to us experiencing
Beauty….1) The thing has to be beautiful (more on this tomorrow) and 2) We have to
desire wonder before pleasure….
4
George MacDonald
5
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
