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Beauty Dies First

Beauty Dies First

Last updated on: December 3, 2016 at 1:36 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Beauty Dies First 2016-12-03T13:36:31-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Jerusalem just before AD. Public Domain.

Herod saw the eternal message of the Star of Bethlehem and could only think about his temporal rule. Real beauty filled the sky and all he could see was a problem.

Confusing what is eternal with what is mortal or changing is one way a culture finds to die. People refuse to compromise on what they should be willing to concede, but will easily give up what no person should ever surrender. This happens when a man will die for tariff policy, but owns a slave. Such a society is doomed to die and deserves the death to come.

Herod heard of a baby and thought of killing.

A culture endures through embracing three great objective pillars, eternal beauty, the eternal good, and eternal truth. God has provided an abundance of liberty within this great cosmic system and much that humankind can choose to do depends only on our preference. We prefer one flavor of ice cream over another and this choice is our own. If (God help us!) we were to command everyone to obey our subjective preferences, that would be tyranny indeed.

God help a culture that forces us all to share the tastes of an elite that denies beauty, goodness, and truth.

In looking at cultures in trouble, Russia in 1917, the American South in 1861, I have seen a general pattern: people replace eternal beauty with their own subjective taste first, moral and spiritual chaos follow. The literature and art of Czarist Russia showed the coming crisis long before any other part of the society. The inability of Southern culture to respond to literature like Uncle Tom’s Cabin on equal terms came from debased or (better) an atrophied sense of beauty brought on by the evil of race based slavery.

Assuming (for a moment) that this is true, then why is it true?

First, we think about beauty far more than we think of the good and the true.

Most choices we make are not matters of “good” and “bad,” but of preference. Out of the hundreds of choices today, I will make mistakes, but few choices for evil. There are ethical boundaries to choices, and they are absolute, but few boundaries! God allows me to pick what I wear today, but does not allow me to hate my enemy.

Truth is even less frequently up for grabs. Unless one is employed as a physicist or a philosopher, then appearance can quite satisfactorily be assumed to be real. We get by very well with the assumption that what we think is true is true. It is even more rare than a moral quandary for most of us to be forced to wonder: what is true or real and what is false or unreal?

We make many decisions about beauty a day, however. What I wear today is my choice, but whether my outfit is beautiful or ugly is not a matter of my opinion. Many of my decisions can mar or mend the world and if I am guided only by my subjective taste, then unless I was born with a very highly developed aesthetic, I will make many mistakes. Just as some seem naturally to be more loving than others, so some seem to “get” beauty more easily than other people.

Countless times a day, American culture educates us that our uneducated taste is what determines beauty or reduces the question of beauty to mere fashion. We don’t ask: “What is lovely?”, but “What is cool?” This is bad training for a person who later wishes to affirm absolute moral values. Picturing the harsh, the ugly, or the inharmonious is sometimes a necessary artistic choice to convey a hard truth (“Racism is bad.”), but embracing it and living in it is not good for the soul. Embracing ugliness based on personal taste happens on the right and the left. It is the trite and ugly religious art in the fundamentalist pastor’s office or the embracing of crudity and intentional grossness in some of campus culture.

Second, mistakes about objective beauty are less immediately serious that other mistakes.

Humans are not good at long term feedback. Fail to save as a young adult and by the time you are a retiree, you will have forgotten the choices that got you to poverty. We may reap what we sow, but sometimes we forget the acorn planting decades ago produced the tree we see now. In the same way, mistakes about beauty add up, but the feedback is much slower than moral and truth mistakes. A man can put up with a fair bit of ugliness in his neighborhood and not notice the harmful toll on his aesthetic sensibility.

Anyone who has to work in a school or college that puts the teacher in classrooms designed only for “practicality” knows the toxic effect this has, but it can be endured with a class that is deeply true or good . . . at least apparently. Teach surrounded by ugliness and it is harder, but seemingly truth and goodness can still be transmitted. Lies in a beautiful room seem obviously worse.

As a result, and perhaps with good reason, we prioritize the good and the true over the beautiful, but then forget that making two things a priority does not mean the third thing does not count at all. By the time we begin to reap the foul harvest from the bad seed we have sown in terms of beauty, we will be incapable of seeing how ugly our souls have become!

If you had to choose between teaching a man how to eat and how to make beautiful music, surely you prioritize the food and water. Yet if you don’t teach a man beautiful music, he will not starve, but he may end up not being much of a man.

Finally (for now!), cultures that reject beauty when dealing with goodness and truth may make goodness and truth unappealing. Imagine a culture where the artists and those skilled in making beauty were rejected by the moral and the truth tellers. These wounded souls might turn to the telling stories that were twisted, yet (fairly) beautiful. In the end, the good, the truth, and beauty cannot really be separated or all die, but the appearance of one can endure without the other.

The pharisee can do right in an ugly manner and so ruin the good. The beautiful may make a lie seem attractive. The truth can be stated so badly that it fails to persuade the simple. If beauty falls into the hands of those who use it only to make money or to propagate injustice or tyranny, then beauty will (eventually!) die, but not until great cultural harm is done.

As Herod looked at the Star, he saw no beauty, just a threat to his rule. He could not find the meaning, in part, because he was hardened to the beauty. If you see a beautiful thing and think: “That must be bad news to my rule.” then something went wrong long before that point. Such a man surely will reject absolute standards of goodness and will eventually come to profound cynicism, a rejection of truth.

—————–

*I am thankful to an outstanding group of Torrey, Wheatstone, and The Saint Constantine School chums who asked for my thoughts.

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