Beauty Is Transcendental

Emerson was moved to pronounce this about beauty: “Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting—a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God, for it is a cup of blessing.” Ancient Christian writers describe beauty as the splendor of the Good, the very radiance of the divine life, which is reflected in creatures that come from and rest in the hands of God. All of Creation participates in this transcendental beauty. Christ exhorts His followers to “be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). The Gospels invite us to conform ourselves to that image, that form of beauty, that is revealed in the person of Christ, the express Image of the Father, who “made the worlds … [and is] the brightness of His [the Father’s] glory” (Heb. 1:2-3). St. Basil the Great reckons that “from nature itself, we strive after the beautiful. All things, then, yearn for God.”

I shall not enter into the much too often exercised argument over whether beauty is objective or subjective, absolute or relative. This is a false path. Beauty is in the eye or ear or nose of the beholder. But this alone does not account for beauty or explain how we come to recognize it. There is a light, not a corporeal light, but an intelligible or spiritual light, through which beauty reveals itself, in which beauty is; for God is “dwelling in unapproachable light” (1 Tim. 6:16). The experience of beauty is an illumination, an enlightenment. Much as time is an analogate of eternity, so corporeal light is an analogate of beauty. Beauty is light. Beauty is grace. Beauty is glory. The glory of God shines from and is reflected in the beauty, order, and harmony of His creation. “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows His handiwork” (Psalm 19:1). Or as Augustine exclaims: “How beautiful is everything, since you made it, but how ineffably more beautiful are you.”

Whether beauty be in an object, such as a sculpture, or communicated directly through the emotions in the rhythm of a poem without the intermediary of an object, beauty is a transcendental. It always surprises. Beauty is not just the product of desire or the quality of an emotion. No degree of conditioning or preparation avails it to us. Whether or not we desire beauty, beauty reaches us from a beyond, which persons of belief know to be God.

In Genesis, the word tov was selected to indicate God’s delight in that which He created. Our English Bibles translate this word as “good”: “God saw the light, that it was good” (Gen. 1:4). “Then God saw everything that He had made; and indeed it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). However, tov is not the literal equivalent of agathon, the usual Greek word for “good.” Thus, when the Hellenic Jews translated the Hebrew Scripture into Greek, known to us as the Septuagint—which was the Bible of the early Church—they translated tov with kalon, which means “beautiful.” They recognized that tov connotes that which is fitting or appropriate, that which harmonizes, and to which one responds with pleasure and approval. This choice of kalon rather than agathon represents the profound intuition that the goodness of God, His glory and His beauty, are one and the same in being. In other words, perfect Goodness, Beauty, and Truth transcend the aesthetical categories and moral distinctions we turn to in a fallen and disharmonious world.

Our experience of good and evil as moral categories is a consequence of the Fall. The same can be said of our aesthetic perceptions of beauty and ugliness. In the kingdom of heaven there is neither evil nor ugliness. Even when art confronts us with ugliness, decay, discord, wickedness, and death, genuine art, the best art there is, does not abandon us to these but rather proffers possibilities for redemption and transfiguration. Jacques Maritain writes: “Art struggles to surmount the distinction between aesthetic beauty and transcendental beauty. And to absorb aesthetic beauty into transcendental beauty.”

In other words, the dyad of the beautiful and the ugly that belongs to a fallen creation is not attributable to the divine life. In the realm of pure Spirit, it makes no sense to speak of ugliness. Every existent thing in its pristine form without complexity or ambiguity is Good and Beautiful within God’s eternity. Those things that, according to an aesthetic measure, impress us as ugly, and those that, according to a moral measure, we judge evil, share the same negative characteristics. They lack integrity and wholeness, they communicate or cause dissonance and discord, and they are dark, which is to say, they are opaque: They lack radiance and limpidity.

Beauty is Light & Life

These qualities of radiance and limpidity are especially significant for an understanding of beauty. In the Gospel of John, Christ announces, “I am the light of the world” (8:12). The same Gospel also proclaims: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it” (1:5). In other words, beauty is light and life. “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men” (1:4). Beauty resurrects us into the light, into eternal life. “For it is God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). Christ is Himself the uncreated beauty of God that has been revealed and been made visible for us in human form. “Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men” (Phil. 2:5-7).

The Spirit gives form to everything that exists. It hovered over the abyss and brought form out of the void and chaos. The Spirit came upon Mary and formed in her womb the man who is God. The Spirit reforms the believer into the image of Christ. The Spirit inspires the artist, the poet, and the musician to create. The artist does not make Beauty; rather, Beauty takes form in the painting, the poem, or the song. We can no more make Beauty than we can make Goodness or Truth. Beauty does not issue from the hand of the artist but moves the artist’s hand to paint or compose beautifully, or, rather, Beauty is the milieu in which the artist paints and the musician composes. Beauty transcends that in which or through which it is manifested. And when we permit the Spirit to enter our lives, scales fall from our eyes and all of our senses are opened once again to Beauty and immortal life as they were in the Garden.

On the Mount, the Spirit revealed Christ’s own hidden beauty to His disciples when they were themselves bathed in the intelligible light of the divine glory, and for one kairos moment the scales of the ancestral sin fell from their eyes and Beauty overcame them. They were bathed in Beauty; not Christ alone, but they also were transfigured by and in the Taboric light.
Yet they did not cry, for they experienced Beauty in its fullness. Until such time, however, that our world and we are transfigured, the tears that we shed when we behold Beauty are blessed by God. Blessed were the emperor’s tears, and equally blessed were the kitchen maid’s. Our tears in this misshapen world are as beads of a prayer for Beauty to reveal herself fully in all of her splendor. And with the seer of Revelation we exclaim: “Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev. 22:20).

Dr. Vigen Guroian is Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies in Orthodox Christianity at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Tending the Heart of Virtue and Rallying the Really Human Things, as well as numerous other books and articles on marriage and family, children’s literature, ecology, gardening, Armenian history, and medical ethics. This article is excerpted from his forthcoming book of essays from Memoria College Press.