What is beauty?

The question has vexed humanity for generations. Ultimately, most of us come to a position characterized by "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". For most, that's good enough - I have my particular tastes in art and music, you have yours.

For others, that apparently leads down a slippery slope toward "today's anti-Christian worldview"...

That quote is taken from an article by a man I respect a great deal. Gene Edward Veith is a primary contributor to World Magazine, a publication I've been reading for years. I generally appreciate the insight Mr. Veith brings to his articles - you can tell he hasn't been striving merely to meet a deadline. But once in a while he takes his anti-postmodern thinking too far for my comfort. A recent article on the nature of beauty was just such an article.

Here's the pivotal paragraph that sets the battle ground:

Often, Christians reject the claims that truth and morality are relative while agreeing with the postmodernists that beauty is relative. But to think that beauty is nothing more than a subjective preference—unconnected to standards that originate in God Himself—is to buy into a foundational principle of today's anti-Christian worldview.

First, can we please all take a vow to stop using the phrase "buy into" in this way? It's demeaning and doesn't make for good dialogue. It's a hard habit to break (I've been working on it for years!), but worth the effort.

More to the point, the real comparison here is not "Christians" to "postmodernists", but "Moderns" to "Postmoderns". There are Christians of both persuasion, just as one would naturally expect.

Unless, that is, you believe Christianity and Postmodernity are incompatible. That, I think, is Mr. Veith's real point, and one that I wholly reject. But setting this aside for today, let's think about the substance of his contention regarding the nature of beauty.

In the very next paragraph, Mr. Veith makes a somewhat audacious claim:

The Bible tells us to set our minds on "whatever" is "excellent" and "of good report" (Philippians 4:8). Beauty does involve personal taste, but our tastes need discipline. Growing in taste means learning to take pleasure in what is objectively good.

Really? Am I seriously to believe that Paul had in mind music and the arts when he spoke to the Philippians about "excellent" and "of good report" things? The word "excellent" simply means "a virtuous course of thought, feeling or action". It was used by the ancients to describe what we today might call "manly character". Honesty, integrity, self-reliance, respect, responsibility - these are the present day American "virtues". But are they absolutes? Can we objectively define these virtues?

Take honesty, for example. "Honey, do I look fat in these jeans?" - the question no husband ever wants to hear. Depending on your cultural context, the "honest" answer will differ. What one might call honest another might call rude! So one's definition of "honesty" should make room for tact, right? What about when being "honest" causes great and unnecessary harm? What about simple cultural differences? Consider Mexico - if you ask for directions you're likely to be given them ... even tough the person you asked has no idea where you want to go! They consider it rude and socially unacceptable to leave the asker in greater stress than they found her, so they will simply give you false directions as a way of easing your immediate stress level. Wrong? Dishonest? In America, absolutely. In Mexico ... it's hard to say, since I'm not Mexican.

The point is that attempting to take an ancient word with at least a somewhat subjective meaning and force it into a Modern box of "divine objectivity" is unfair at best. There is no slippery slope here, folks. Beauty has always been in the eye of the beholder, and I for one think that's the way God intended it.

The full article is worth the read, so I encourage you to do so if you haven't. But far be it from me to decide for you whether you should consider his writing beautiful or not!

Hatushili