WHY BEAUTY?

In Christianity, beauty holds a special place in the worship of God. It has the power to awaken feelings of joy and gratitude and to reveal something about the nature of God. From the tradition of sacred art to the beauty of creation, Christianity has always recognized the importance of beauty in the spiritual life. But in contemporary culture, beauty is often overlooked or devalued. How can we rediscover the value of beauty in our own lives and in our worship of God?

Beauty is among many things we have lost since the era of prosperity in the medieval Church. Along with the secular culture came the plague of ugliness and superficiality, the ,,form follows function‘‘ movement, as well as minimalism and preference for artificial over natural, as we can see in living Christmas trees in town squares being replaced with structures of wire, glass and plastic. Beauty as worship and as a feature of God‘s character has been replaced with beauty as mere sales point and fashion choice.

We have lost ambition towards greatness together with the ambition to know God. If there is no highest good, there is no point in striving upwards. If there is no absolute truth, beauty and goodness, then there is no hierarchy of values and morals either. Anything can be good, anything can be bad, depending on a momentary judgement of the observant. If there is no hell and no heaven, there isn‘t much to the in-between either. We‘re floating in a 3d space of reality with no edges and no axis that tells us up and down. It is no wonder we ended up with disharmony, disunity and dismemberment of moral structures. Those are hard to achieve and if you remove the end, you simultaneously remove the motivation and flatten everything to whim and expediency that don’t hold up to rigor that is required in order to achieve greatness. 

In Christianity, on the other hand, everything matters. Every little thing occupies space in a hierarchy of worship of God. Every little thing is given a talent to multiply and give back to the Giver. Man is the greatest of creatures and is given the right to orchestrate all the rest of creation into the ideal worship. It‘s the idea that inspired tradition of beauty where the concentration of the highest artistic and design achievements revolves around worship. Every creature, from stone to flower, to rabbit is purified to its highest form, to  become a garment, a statue, an icon paint. A stone that is laying in the field, no matter how monumental, is mute until carved out by a talented sculptor into something that speaks better than words. The Pieta, a slab of marble that tells the greatest love story in world history is a stone that participates in worship of God through human hands long after the artist himself passed away. For centuries human excellence had brought about the sacred art music and architecture where the greatness of the subject found its match in the mastery of artistic execution, the former of which has been lost in art over the last couple of centuries where the content of art has deteriorated from sacred to secular and nowadays, to profane.  

Beauty awakens worship without us even acknowledging it. A splendid mountain mountain panorama, the Great Canyon, the Niagara falls, a sunset, for a millionth time – a sunset! Experience of beauty moves us to joy and tears, awakens the higher instincts and the gratefulness. The sigh of heart at a beautiful thing or a view is the worship of God absent of words but abundant with thanksgiving. We cannot be grateful to ourselves, since we have not created it. We cannot be grateful to big bang or evolution, since we cannot make ourselves believe that beauty of such excellence is a mere coincidence or an obvious end to billions of years of geological processes. The secret of it is to know its Creator, to know to whom we are grateful, even when not acknowledging him. 

The world didn‘t have to be this beautiful in order to exist. The bird could‘ve just been a plane with organs inside instead of engines and passenger seats. Why is a bird so heartbreakingly beautiful? A small creature that doesn‘t have an eternal soul like humans do or free will or discernment between good and evil, is nonetheless clothed in overabundant beauty with every detail of its feathers praising God, with its simple life giving testimony to God‘s goodness and love of His creatures. Creation teaches us about God and His eternal laws, it also tells us about His character. reatures become words for him to speak. I wonder if first came the sacrifice and only then blood? If first came the good and evil and only then day and night? Since God is eternal and the laws of God came before creation of the world, the creation reflects eternal laws like eternal symbols that took on flesh in finite creation. It follows from there, what it means that man was made in the image of God. He created Man as a finite symbol of divinity so that God could incarnate and become man.

Beauty is important because in our pursuit of God it stands equal to truth and goodness through which we are so used to search for God and yet, as someone wise said, beauty is the only spiritual thing that we can see with our eyes.