We are called to create beauty and try our best to experience it. Beauty is something that I think is sorely misunderstood in the modern world, with its meaning at least in the West, completely perverted. So what does beauty mean? Beauty exists only as a complement to truth and justice. What this means in practical terms is that something exudes beauty if it simultaneously is both truthful to the nature of reality and reflects the spirit of justice. What’s important to note is that beauty is not a concept wholly separate from truth or justice. All three are woven together and form the fabric that informs the individual’s and society’s understanding of morality. These three together could be said to make up the platonic idea of “The Good.”
Why then am I writing about how we are called to make beauty and to experience it? Primarily because of the three components of the good, beauty is the one that has been most attacked and deliberately transformed. Yet, even with this, true beauty can cut through anything. There is something inherently instinctual about the human experience of beauty. Acknowledging and appreciating beauty truly is the essence of being human. No other animals gaze upon a sunset simply for the sake of taking in the colors that the sky paints for us each night. Only humans write poetry to detail the duality of existence - their sorrow and their bliss, musing upon the fallen state we find ourselves in. The earliest relics of humanity are cave paintings, a medium that, while no longer contemporary, still bites at our souls.
Art has an unfortunate connotation for many people. There’s often a notion of skill or ability that people use as a rationale for not attempting to make art themselves. What’s most unfortunate is that this notion of art implicitly rejects other ways that beauty can be made manifest. There is an elegance to a job well done, or an essay that is elegant and punctual in its approach, or even a mathematical proof.
Why now, though? Simply because beauty has and likely will continue to be misunderstood in the public consciousness. You can often hear people saying that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” which lowers beauty simply to desires of the flesh - it degrades the concept of beauty by refusing its proper place next to truth and justice. This is without even getting into the can of worms that is the idea of “objective” beauty, which may be the most polarizing issue of all, because of beauty’s deep relationship with truth and justice.
This is in contrast to what many people say is the biggest polarizer, primarily politics. While there are many components of political life that lead people to being ugly to each other, having an improper understanding of beauty would be even worse in this regard.
Where then can we look for an exemplar of beauty if it is so readily missing from society? From personal experience I can only offer the Christian exemplar of beauty, the Virgin Mary. For Christians, Mary exudes the most beauty of humans, besides Christ naturally. Mary can serve as the role model of beauty in one’s actions and attitudes. By becoming more like the Mother Mary, the inhumanness of the present might finally begin to dissolve away, and reveal the loving and just society that many of us so desperately crave.
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