Where the Beauty Came From

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing—to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from.”

—C. S. Lewis

At age eleven classical music started it all for me. My parents, wanting to divert me from what they viewed as the corrupting rock ‘n’ roll of the sixties, got me a set of LPs introducing the great composers: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, Chopin, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, and a few others. I listened to them over and over during my early teenage years. I came to love them, to know them by heart. I got a taste of how beauty works, how it settles down deep in the soul, stirring feelings both noble and aching and giving glimpses into regions unknown.

Maybe this all started the day when my fifth-grade class got to go to the symphony orchestra. We were loaded onto a school bus, given sack lunches, and driven to the civic center and concert hall in Orlando. We joined hundreds of other elementary school children, finding our seats, watching the orchestra warming up on stage amid the buzz of voices. We had been instructed on some things about an orchestra: what it was, the various instruments, the kinds of music it played, the role of the conductor and the concert master. We were to applaud when the conductor entered and when an entire piece (not just a movement) was finished.

The orchestra played a whole Beethoven symphony and Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. My eyes could not move fast enough and my ears were not skilled enough to take it all in, but it was both fascinating and magical, glorious and mesmerizing. Unforgettable. What was this thing I had experienced?

Philosopher Roger Scruton, in Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, wrote: “beauty is an ultimate value—something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations.”¹ This trio—the true, the good, and the beautiful—are traditionally known as the “three transcendentals.” They were called that because they were viewed as the three qualities that God possesses in infinite abundance.

Hans Urs von Balthasar spent much of his career seeking to reclaim beauty as one of the great transcendentals. In a world where sin and error are rife and truth and goodness hotly contested, beauty has a key role. Beauty, he says, can sail under the radar of our arguments over what is true and good and, in the process, smuggle in a ray of the beatific vision. Beauty can pierce the heart, wounding us with the transcendent glory of God. Beauty, he says, “dances as an uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another.”²

Concerned about the neglect of beauty by Christians in our time, writer and poet Dana Gioia spoke of “the necessary relationship between truth and beauty, which is not mere social convention or cultural accident but an essential form of human knowledge—intuitive, holistic, and experiential.” It is a form of human knowing that “awakens, enlarges, and refines our humanity.”³

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I grew up in a Christian tradition that highly valued truth and goodness but in which beauty had no intentional place—and certainly not as an “ultimate value” worthy of pursuit for its own sake. We would hear about the beauty of holiness. And the beauty of nature was to be praised because it was God’s handiwork, but the accoutrements of man-made beauty were seen to easily distract the church from its God-given mission. The pursuit of beauty—as I learned in my childhood experience as well as in my historical research—was associated with refinement, excess, and wealth. Leaders like David Lipscomb (1831–1917) spoke sharply against beautiful and expensive church buildings—and the well-to-do members who built them. The church, he believed, was “the especial legacy of God to the poor of the earth”; the rich—the usual patrons of the arts—tended to be the “great corrupters” of the church.⁴

We also tended to read the Bible with a kind of flat-footed literalness that focused on facts and commands. In one of the most common formulations in denominational heritage, the gospel was facts to be believed, commands to be obeyed, and promises to be enjoyed. In this way of reading, one must push past the “highly-colored imagery” in Scripture and retain only the “real facts and unadorned doctrine.” The “poetic element” must be “rendered simple.”⁵

My parents embraced this traditional theology, which for them meant an indifference—sometimes even an aversion—to beautiful things. Everything about my childhood home was starkly and unexceptionally utilitarian. Simple, plain, inexpensive, bare. Sometimes ugly. Never any conversation about art, and, as far as I know, never any attention to music. Except hymns at church. (And a set of classical records for me—to protect me from rock ‘n’ roll.)

A vital part of my journey of faith has been a Christian theology of beauty. Here’s how I’ve learned to put it. The beauty of God is the beauty of perfect love—the love between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The Incarnation of Jesus, with his dying and rising, becomes the clearest and most decisive portrayal of this love. We can call it a display of the “art” of God’s love, so it becomes the supreme model of all worldly and human beauty. And the Holy Spirit—the one through whom God’s love is poured into our hearts—becomes what we could call the “beautifier.” The Spirit has befriended matter, befriended creation, and seeks creation’s wholeness. Through the experience of created beauty, the Spirit awakens in us the desire for the wholeness, the shalom, of the age to come.

A Christian account of beauty is shaped not primarily by envisioning a return to a paradise lost, but rather anticipating a glory yet to appear—a glory or beauty already seen in Jesus Christ but that is being spread about through the Holy Spirit. The beauty we discern now is a preview, given by the Spirit, of a beauty yet to come in the new heaven and new earth. It is being revealed in the midst of a creation still groaning in anticipation (Rom. 8:20–22). Earth’s most dazzling beauty is thus only a glimpse of the beauty to come.

C. S. Lewis, at the very end of the Narnia stories, put it like this: “All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page; now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read; which goes on forever; in which every chapter is better than the one before.”⁶

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A few years ago, my wife and I attended a performance of Handel’s Messiah by the Nashville Symphony and Chorus. It was conducted by the acclaimed maestro of the symphony, Giancarlo Guerrero, Nicaraguan born and a Baylor University graduate; he was joined by four acclaimed soloists and a 165-member choir. Guerrero directed without a baton, using his arms, hands, and all ten fingers as subtly and beautifully as any ballet dancer. It was magnificent.

I thought of Lewis’s words: “We do not want merely to see beauty. . . . We want to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it. . . to bathe in it.”⁷ God placed a strong desire for beauty in every one of us, and this night I think the “beautifier” let us bathe in it.

There’s the aria in part two where the tenor sings, “Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto his sorrow.” In fifteen spare measures, Handel seems to catch up the anguish of the whole world. Or the final chorus, “Worthy is the lamb that was slain,” which swells with grandeur and glory seldom matched in modern music. Who could not be moved? And not only moved. Caught up. Caught up in the God of beauty. Caught up in the Great Story, the story we believe to be the true story of the world.

Lewis again: “At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. . . . We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so.”⁸ 

1. Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2.
2. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 1:18.
3. Dana Gioia, The Catholic Writer Today: And Other Essays (Menomonee Falls, WI: Wiseblood Books, 2019).
4. Anthony Dunnavant, “David Lipscomb on the Church and the Poor,” Restoration Quarterly 33 (1991), 75-85.
5. James S. Lamar, The Organon of Scripture: Or, the Inductive Method of Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1860), 235.
6. C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle (London: The Bodley Head, 1956), chapter 15.
7. C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 12-13.
8. Ibid.