Big Beauty and little
beauty
Last week we began by placing ourselves in a position that
will define our relationship to and understanding of beauty. The position we
marked out is based on an understanding that God created the world as an
expression of his glory, and he is glorified when his creatures delight in him.
John Piper writes, paraphrasing Jonathan Edwards, “God’s aim in creating the
world was to display the value of his own glory, and that aim is no other than
the endless, ever-increasing joy of his people in that Glory” (Piper, God’s
passion for his Glory p.32). So what does the glory of God have to do with
beauty? We began by looking at creation and the integral part that beauty plays
in the created world. Today we are going to build on that, to attempt to define
beauty from the standpoint of the glory of God.
The first question to ask, of course, is what is beauty? And
what does beauty have to do with the glory of God? While we aren’t going to
come up with an easy answer, my hope is that we can gain a deeper understanding
and broader perspective of how the two ideas are related, and why beauty is
important.
To define beauty we are going to do more philosophy than
theology, but it is a philosophy that is built on that spot that we earlier
staked out. Jonathan Edwards in his essay “On the Nature of True Virtue” defines
two types of beauty which strikes me as a really good way of looking at things.
The first beauty he defines is a spiritual as well as physical beauty, one that
is synonymous with virtue, a beauty that is apparent when something or someone
is seen comprehensively, inside and out, and here is the kicker: in relation to
God and his glory. This idea of beauty is an old one, equating beauty with
truth, love, courage etc. Virtues and virtuous acts are considered beautiful,
and this is, for the most part, universal. Cultures may disagree on the
ordering of virtues, which is more important than the other, but all agree on
the basic virtues of love, of truthfulness, of courage, etc. This is Big Beauty,
objective beauty. True virtue consists primarily of love (of God and others)
and then acts that come from it. This is why you can stare at your child and marvel at his
beauty. To others he is a cute kid more or less, but nothing special, but to
you he is staggeringly beautiful. The love creates the beauty.
But not everything that is beautiful is virtuous and that is
where the second definition of beauty comes in.
Little beauty is what we most often think of as beauty. It
is the aesthetic and harmonious arrangement of features or elements that when
viewed together create pleasure in the viewer. For example: the symmetrical arrangement
of features on a face creates little beauty. The arrangement of textures and
colors and shapes in a landscape, the arrangement of notes in a song, the
arrangement of graceful movements in a dance. This is why we collect random
objects and arrange them on our coffee tables and mantels. Little beauty is
subject to personal taste and cultural norms and as such is primarily
experiential and subjective. Jonathan Edwards links Big Beauty and little
beauty through the concept of harmony: “Beauty consists not in discord or
dissent, but in consent or agreement”, in little beauty the consent and
agreement is in the relationship of parts to the whole and to the viewer, in
Big Beauty the consent and agreement he is referring to is a harmonious
relationship between our will and God’s will, which results in true virtue. In
this linking Edwards claims that the harmony that defines little beauty is a
picture of the harmony that defines Big Beauty, and was given to man as an
instinct by God.
In establishing this law
of nature God seems to want the natural agreement ·that causes the pleased
sense of secondary beauty· to resemble the spiritual, heartfelt agreement that
original beauty consists in. But men’s pleased sense of secondary beauty doesn’t
come from any reflection on or perception of such a resemblance. Their
sensation of pleasure when they encounter secondary beauty is an immediate
upshot of the law God has established, i.e. the instinct he has given (Jonathan
Edwards "On the Nature of True Virtue", Chapter 3).
In other words, when we encounter something beautiful we don’t
stop to think: my but those pleasing relationships between objects reminds me
of the relationship between God and the Son and the Holy Spirit… We enjoy it instinctively
and leave it at that. In that way little beauty, secondary beauty is for us,
for our pleasure, but also for God’s pleasure, because he sees all of the
connections and interrelations and enjoys them as a reflection of his Glory.
This is the relationship between God’s Glory and beauty, and
here I am paraphrasing renowned theologian, Richelle Howard: Beauty, both Big
and little, can be seen as the transposition of God’s glory. When God, who is
spirit, decided to create a world out of matter, he decided to translate what
was experienced only by him, and shift it to form and matter so his creation
could experience it in a similar way.
Little beauty, in form and matter, is part of God’s
creation, part of the expression of his glory. However, because it is part of
God’s creation it has been affected by sin and the fall, which we will get into
in depth next week, but for the moment, this fallen aspect of little beauty
needs to be noted because it warps the way in which we experience beauty, the
link between Big Beauty and little beauty has been disrupted.
John Calvin in book one of the Institutes of the Christian
Religion wrote concerning the link between Big and little beauty and man’s
ability to perceive it, he wrote that people rarely direct their minds to God
when they see the structure and organization of the world. Instead they content
themselves to view his work, and do not think of him. “but, notwithstanding the clear
representations given by God in the mirror of his works, both of himself and of
his everlasting dominion, such is our stupidity, that, always inattentive to
these obvious testimonies, we derive no advantage from them”. Calvin is writing
specifically in relation to the ongoing debate of the nature and value of
images and church decoration, the other side was focused on the ability of
imagery and beauty to direct the mind of the worshiper to higher, heavenly
things.
I’m going to go out
on a limb a little here, I don’t have any theologians in my pocket to back me
up, but I think, that given our understanding that God created the world for
himself, and that beauty and the experience of beauty by his creatures is a
part of it, that when we experience little beauty we are echoing God’s pleasure
in himself. When we fully understand the link between little beauty and big
beauty, the link between beauty and God’s glory we experience it how it is
meant to be experienced and that glorifies God in a very real way. But when we experience
beauty, even without that understanding, we are still participating in the system
that God set up for his glory, therefor still bringing God glory whether we
know it or not. It’s like the change in designation from B.C./A.D to B.C.E/C.E ,
the name f the eras have changed, but the foundation of them hasn’t. The world
is still counting time from the birth of Christ no matter what they name it.
