O Precarious Ally - Part I
The Two Faces of Beauty
“Beauty will save the world,” said Prince Lev Nikolyaevich Myshkin in Dosteovsky’s The Idiot. A bold claim, and yet something about it seems to strike a chord. We’ve heard a lot about beauty of late—we’ve even discussed it ourselves here at the Nuns’ Nook (Art & Monasticism, January 2025). Pope Benedict the XVI, along with other major Catholic figures—especially (and not surprisingly) within the reviving world of Catholic arts and literature—have hailed this as a movement of the moment, the way to the heart of a jaded post-Christian culture: the Via Pulchritudinis—a recapturing of the world, indeed a way of living, through the reflection of the beauty of God’s face.
The power of beauty is readily discernible within our human experience; most everyone has felt the impact of a spectacular sunset, the sky riven with purples and oranges, or the heady combination of freedom and terror stirred while watching the wild sea surging through a storm. Few things can equal a first-time encounter with true peaks, capped with snow and yet still seemingly endless in their reach. The capturing of this immense gift is the purview of the Fine Arts, including the literary arts, and immersing ourselves in these arts is just one more encounter with this heady reality and, potentially, a way of expressing our Catholic faith in a way that opens up its broad and beautiful horizons to others. The ease and totality with which our hearts and minds are seized by these moments, in art as in life, speaks for itself, and rare (I would dare to say non-existent) is the person who does not want more of the encounter in life.
I don’t really need to describe the ache that beauty prompts, either.
These moments translate somehow into a deep craving, soul-deep. As a student of Christopher West’s put it roughly: It’s not enough to see a sunrise. We want to eat it.[1] The wistful hankering of wanderlust and all manner of other yearnings is obvious on the most cursory glance at the average social media feed. A similar pull can be experienced at the end of a really good book. We cannot just look at beauty, we must possess it—not just once, but always.
But why? Why must we? And, more importantly for this post, should we?
Don’t worry, we’re not here to abandon the Via Pulchritudinis. In fact, we’re quite attached to it. There is something about beauty, however, that begs a closer look, a deeper exploration before we cast ourselves headlong into it.
If you find Prince Myshkin’s declaration a little on the overzealous side, you’re not the only one. In fact, one of our sisters once expressed that she actually found it mildly blasphemous. “Beauty may save the world,” she struggled, “but only in a very qualified way.” So, let’s look this question square in the eyes—what are the corners, the angles, the dark spots? As contemplatives, we love to tease out such questions.
Firstly, what is beauty? If you haven’t heard Fr. Thomas Joseph White, OP discuss this for the Thomistic Institute, we highly recommend it. He covers some of the most critical questions surrounding beauty, and responds with the foundational wisdom of Saint Thomas Aquinas, including two definitions of beauty that are extraordinarily helpful.
For the sake of this blog post, we can’t delve as deeply as we might like, but let us attempt to develop a working concept that is not too stunted in its superficiality. Let us say that the reason we are drawn to the beautiful is that we recognize something good in it. In fact, Saint Thomas declares that Beauty and Goodness are fundamentally the same thing—which continues to be an astounding claim 800 years later. What he means by this is that something is beautiful if it conforms to what it ought to be according to the plan of God, i.e: when it is good. As rational beings, we are made to recognize this good, to identify the underlying plan and see the perfection with which each object conforms to it—or the deformity of each one that falls short of its intended shape. When we are functioning at our best, we see what is good and we call it ‘beautiful’.
Now, this obviously has a sensory aspect, which accounts partially for another definition of Saint Thomas’s, that “beautiful things are those which please when seen”.[2] While this has a context in the Summa Theologiae, and cannot be used too glibly, it notes an aspect of beauty which is important. We experience the beautiful. Though it does exist objectively—what is good is beautiful—there is a fullness in its being received and known. As such, we might say that, ultimately, beauty is the sensible quality of the good.
But why are we drawn to the beautiful?
Well, as finite, material beings, our souls are made to know that we are missing something, that we want to come to completion, to the perfection of our nature, and that in order to do this, we need something else, something extrinsic to ourselves. As such, our will is constantly on the search for this ‘other’ and finds it in all sorts of things – good food, good coffee, good people... These things are good for us, because they complete us in some way, they bring our nature from its potential into its full actuality. As humans, we should eat, we should drink good coffee, and we should absolutely enjoy relationships with good people. The draw we feel towards these goods Saint Thomas calls, in the tradition of the ancients, ‘desire’. It is that thing which, having seen the good in something, moves us to obtain it. To get up from the couch and go and meet that friend for lunch, we have to want it. (Sometimes, like on a lazy Saturday, we really have to want it.)
Saint Augustine believed that desire is one of the most important drives in the human heart. It is the push responsible not only for our hidden 3am dreams, but for our being able to do anything at all. Without it, says the Bishop of Hippo, we would go nowhere, and whatever does not move, cannot live, and certainly cannot reach the end for which it was made. It is a force, in-built in our nature, to push us on to reaching our greatest potential, and ultimately the yearning that pushes us beyond our material needs into that deep craving for God.
Now, that’s all very well, but anyone who has been alive for longer than five minutes can tell you that not everything we desire is good for us. (During Lent, we may feel this all the more acutely!) Sometimes we want something not because it is ultimately good for us, but because it is temporarily good for us and, more particularly, much more temporarily pleasurable to us. The second part of this in-built force in our nature is that, when we obtain the good we are seeking for our perfection, having desired and pursued it, we experience a rush of heady delight, which we call ‘pleasure’.
Properly ordered, this pleasure is a signal that we have achieved the right end, we have done something profitable to our nature and good for it. Since the Fall, however, the desire for this ‘rush’ can quickly outstrip the desire for the good itself. In fact, without care, we can very easily confuse the two, thinking that the feeling of pleasure is the very purpose of the good in the first place. This disorder means we quite frequently prioritize these lesser goods, in fact, we can sometimes make these lesser goods the Absolute Answer to our interior ache to the point of overlooking everything else.
When this happens, Scripture calls it ‘idolatry’, which brings us back to beauty and right to the heart of a thorny reality: beauty, by its very compelling nature, is one of the most powerful tools of deception for making us idolize lesser goods. We see it right there in Eden: “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate...”[3] With a powerful, imminent beauty before us, it is incredibly difficult to look to our Ultimate End, which is always God. In fact, the better the beauty—the closer the good in question comes to God—the more dangerous it is as a power for our destruction.
An excellent example of this is offered by Bishop Erik Varden in his book Chastity. Eros is one of the most powerful forces of desire within our human experience. So much so, that it has been condemned as inherently evil by puritanical philosophies for millennia. Why? I would suggest (with some others) that it is because this instinctive drive for spousal union with another human being is an icon of one of the deepest beauties of our spiritual lives. The sacrament of matrimony, along with a host of scriptural allusions, is a testament to the fact that an incredibly important aspect of God’s love for us is spousal, and the proximity of this good to the Ultimate Good, the fact that it is the very image of our union with God, makes it one of the greatest goods to be possessed, and thereby produces within us one of the greatest desires we can experience.
So, where’s the danger?
Bishop Varden draws a direct line between eros and death itself with an allusion to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. The beauty of the connection between these literary lovers (though the attraction is magically induced) is so forceful, that they are willing to give everything for it, including their very selves. Their desire becomes like a living thing, and “[T]ristan is unselved by what lives in him. He knows this is so, yet surrenders. Isolde does the same. The sweetness of annihilating bliss is too great.”[4] Our attachment to beauty may not result in such a dramatic outcome, but the power of it to distract us from our true end is manifest.
Another key example is found in the life of English writer Oscar Wilde—though, thankfully, with a somewhat happier outcome. For most of his life, Wilde was drawn to the Catholic Church, but like many of his contemporaries, the attraction was to the profound beauty of it. A romantic by nature, Wilde became an aesthete almost by profession, and his dedication to the beautiful, mirrored Tristan’s for Isolde to the point of wanton destruction in his personal and public life. In the end, Wilde was received into the Church on his deathbed, but the battle between the possession of beauty and the possession of God was fierce to the end.
If we point to our current culture, a look at the entertainment industry is another impressive example of the danger of the allure of a beauty that is not properly grounded. This, for two reasons: one, the millions of fans who are almost worshipfully devoted to story itself and its catharsis, rather than what can be gleaned from it and lived, and two, the power of this devotion to undermine fundamental realities about God and our world. By this last, I mean the fact of using beauty to conceal an underlying lie or corruption, making it palatable, even beautiful, and thereby tempting the culture to believe it to be good.
Are we to conclude, then, that beauty can lead only to death? Are we to conclude that it is an ally too dangerous to welcome in opening ourselves and others to Christ? Never. Just because a thing may be corrupted, does not mean it cannot be embraced. But the embrace must be an ordered one, a wise and open-eyed one. It must be one governed by its proper end, and carefully nurtured to assess its health routinely: are we in love with beauty, or the God of beauty?
The difference matters.
So, how do we engage with beauty? How do we live it with integrity and purpose without playing with an unnecessary fire? Join us for Part II to find out what the monastic tradition has to contribute to the conversation.
We hope to see you there.
[1] See West, Christopher, Eating the Sunrise: Meditations on the Liturgy and Our Hunger for Beauty, (Theology of the Body Institute Press, 2024).
[2] Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, Question 5, Article 4, Reply to Objection 1.
[3] Genesis 3:6
[4] Varden, Erik, Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses, (Bloomsbury: London, 2023).
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