Beauty Redeems the World, part 1
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot. For many reasons, he sounds like
an idiot—today even more than before. Nothing redeems the world anymore;
terms like redemption or justification have disappeared from the public sphere
and come to be religious gibberish. Moreover, if there is anything in Christianity
that brings hope to this world, it is not beauty. One may suggest justice, human
dignity, or peace for the Christian agenda for the world, but not beauty. Even
those who consider art the source of meaning in this world find the word beauty
old-fashioned and inadequate. Aesthetic value has replaced beauty in the philosophy
of art. In this article, I nevertheless maintain that Prince Myshkin was
right. The Christian faith is an aesthetic view of the world: it perceives beauty
even where beauty is not apparent. This is possible because a Christian is a person
who is beautiful in God’s sight.
For Protestants, discussion of beauty may seem particularly alien. “Beauty
redeems the world” is hardly in accordance with the Reformation slogans “Christ
alone, faith alone, the Scripture alone.” Yet, Lutheranism has produced extraordinary
beauty in the world through the music of Johann Sebastian Bach andthe paintings of Lucas Cranach, among others. Perhaps the most concise formulation
of the Lutheran doctrine of justification is expressed with the notion of
beauty: “Sinners are beautiful because they are loved; they are not loved because
they are beautiful.”
Scruples for the Aesthetic Understanding of Christianity
If the aesthetic dimension of our life would disappear, we would not tell bedtime
stories, watch soap operas on television, listen to the car radio (except perhaps for
news), or share our photographs on social media. Besides these obvious things,
there are other areas in our life that we do not usually think of as aesthetic: our
car is designed to please the eye, not just to be technically excellent. Most parts
of sporting events serve more the aesthetic pleasure than the game result. Even
military actions have a peculiar aesthetic, appalling as it may be. In a word, a life
deprived of aesthetic dimension would not be a human life at all, not to mention
that most likely even animals enjoy beautiful colors and sing and play games just
for fun.
The foremost playground of aesthetics is art. Art has been suspect in Platonist,
Christian, and Marxist orthodoxy. Enjoying art—music or drama, in particular—
has been viewed as vulgar, sinful, or bourgeois entertainment. The Puritan view
of Christianity, be it medieval monasticism, German pietism, or Anglo-Saxon
revivalism, has always thought artistic ambitions if not sinful, at least superfluous.
Somewhat paradoxically, Thomas à Kempis speaks eloquently for the futility
of the transitory human life in The Imitation of Christ, and C. H. Spurgeon is still
remembered for his oratory skills. Even the most ascetic Christian thinkers have
needed beauty to persuade their followers.
This very persuasion may be the key to the religious suspicion toward beauty.
According to Thomas Aquinas, “things that cause pleasure when seeing them are
called beautiful.” Beautiful things cause sensuous pleasure, and that has been
problematic for Christian theologians. Augustine discussed widely his sensory
temptations in the tenth book of his Confessions. Being vulnerable to the power
of music, Augustine asked himself whether he more enjoyed the music or the
words when he listened to church songs. In the former case, he thought to havecommitted a sin, albeit a minor one. Music and arts arouse emotions that have
been estimated already in Greek philosophy as something belonging to the lower
part of human soul. A wise person is governed by reason, not emotions.
Another important factor in aesthetic experience is its physicality. Aesthetics
comes from the word aesthesis, which literally means “sense-perception, sensation.”
Objects of art are always irrevocably physical. A poem or a novel, a piece
of music, a sculpture or a painting is a physical object. Beauty is connected to our
bodily existence, hence something irrelevant to our spirituality, according to the
Platonist reading.
At the same time, one may argue that physicality and affectivity are the theological
virtues of beauty. Christianity is an irrevocably bodily religion. Our sacred
texts tell about a particular nation in the ancient Near East, the salvation of humankind
occurs in the midst of history, and in the center of the Christian service there
is not meditation but a meal. Christians don’t escape the bodily existence even in
death because they confess to believe in “the resurrection of the flesh.”
As for affectivity, a true Christian is not a Stoic philosopher, undisturbed in
hardships. Jesus wept (John 11:35), was deeply distressed and troubled in Gethsemane
(Mark 14:33), and cried at the cross, “my God, my God, why have you
forsaken me” (Mark 15:34). The classics of Christian spirituality have always
understood that faith is a matter of the heart—which does not refer to sentimentality
but includes the affectivity as well as reason. Luther renounces the Stoic view of
emotions in his Lectures of Genesis when he states that the saints are “the tenderest
people,” capable of both mourning and rejoicing. The peculiarity of a Christian’s
emotions is not that they are under reason’s control but that they are especially
warm and tender.
(with the kind permission of Word & World. Published before in the journal's Volume 39, Number 1
Winter 2019)
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